Auburn High athletics seeing resurgence. Baseball team hopes to join the party

In an athletic year already full of highlights, the Auburn baseball team is doing its best to add a final achievement to the overall tally for 2021-22.

“We believe this is a special moment,” junior center fielder Amari Goodfellow said. “This is a really, really special year. We made the football playoffs after like a seven-year drought. We just won our first (baseball) league title since 2008.”

And in between, the Auburn basketball team won that program’s first state title in the school’s history, eventually drawing national attention and playing for a title in a first-ever national invitational tournament in Florida.

Where the Trojans baseball squad ultimately will fit into the school’s pantheon of accomplishments this school year remains to be seen. But they already have made a mark by besting the field in a combined 4A/3A North Puget Sound League to win that title, even if the accomplishment pales in comparison to the results on which this team has its sights set.

“Our goal is to win state,” senior pitcher Colton Anardi said. “That’s all we’ve talked about all season long. The bigger the games, the better we play.”

Actually, Auburn has played pretty well all season long – no matter what the competition.

A combination made up primarily of seniors and juniors has matured over the past two years into a squad that earned the No. 3 seed to the district tournament that was scheduled to begin on Saturday against fifth-seeded Gig Harbor. A victory in that game brought with it an immediate berth to the state tournament.

Because of its regular-season success, Auburn was rewarded with multiple opportunities to advance out of districts.

“It’s a really loaded district,” Auburn coach Gordon Elliott said. “And the way they do state now – it’s a 20-team tournament. It’s kind of all-new territory. But our district gets seven teams.”

The district tournament is simply the next step for this group of Trojans, and it’s a step years in the making. It’s also the group that Elliott has shepherded since his return to the dugout four years ago.

The former head football and baseball coach had his plans to retire in place when the Trojans parted ways with Justin Mentink in January of 2019. Elliott still was the in the building, ready to complete his final semester of teaching.

“I was all set to have a nice last semester of relaxation,” Elliott said. “They were in need and I was there. I thought I’d come in and take over for the season. I found I enjoyed it again.”

Four years later, Elliott has a team that appears ready to challenge for a title in the Class 3A ranks. It’s a team he saw start to come together from that first spring, then hit a bit of a wall as the Covid-19 pandemic stole two seasons of development from them.

“There were a lot of hurdles with Covid,” Elliott said. “That was a real development time and we lost that. We got cheated out of a lot of games.”

The pandemic erased the entirety of the 2020 season, when these seniors led by Anardi were sophomores. The 2021 campaign was reduced to 13 games with no state playoffs, and Auburn managed to win just five of those games a year ago.

But finally, there is something to play for beyond the NPSL in 2022. And the Trojans have embraced their opportunity.

“Last year we got screwed up with Covid,” Anardi said. “We just didn’t click. But we kind of reflected on it. We knew this was going to be our season, and our mindset changed. This is what we’ve been thinking about since our freshman season.”

Anardi has led a deep pitching staff, going 6-0 with a 0.85 earned run average over the course of the year. As the ace of the staff, Anardi pitches most of the big games. When not on the mound, he plays on the infield with the rest of the senior core, batting .364 through the regular season.

In the outfield, it’s a trio of juniors with Goodfellow and his brother Jailon, along with Brendan Stein.

“The three of them are just outstanding outfielders,” Elliott said. “In fact, we had one game against Federal Way where each of them threw out a runner at a base. Game by game, we’ve won games a lot of different ways. I hope that helps us as we get into the post-season.”

“The chemistry we have out there, we just know where everybody likes to play,” Goodfellow said. “And we all just have a passion for baseball.”

It’s a passion that has helped these Trojans develop, despite the pandemic, into a cohesive team that believes in itself and has forged a 16-5 overall record, 15-4 in the NPSL, just months after what coach and players said was a 2021 season of “under-performing.”

“A year makes a big difference,” Anardi said. “We’ve all kind of known each other our whole lives. Once we started playing, it’s just been natural. Our whole team can do everything. It’s one through nine in our lineup.”

And in this seeming year of destiny at Auburn High, who knows where it just might lead.