‘Messing with a memory.’ Bad vibes linger after canceled WA state baseball games
.jpg "Some of the lights at Parker Faller Field in Yakima during Puyallup’s 4A state semifinal game against Lake Washington were not working on Friday, May, 30, 2025, causing officials and the WIAA to move the remainder of the game to 10 a.m. the next day.")
Steve Kelley was excited to watch his son play his final high school baseball game. Tanner Kelley, a senior at Gig Harbor High School, didn’t see the field in the team’s Class 3A state tournament semifinal loss to Kennewick at Parker Faller Field in Yakima on Friday, May 30. But he was penciled in as the designated hitter for Gig Harbor’s third/fourth place consolation game against Ballard the next day.
Then controversy struck. Lighting issues during a 4A state semifinal game between Puyallup and Lake Washington on Friday night caused the game to be suspended and resumed Saturday morning. As a result, the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA) canceled the 3A and 4A consolation games.
Just like that, it was over. Parents like Steve Kelley, and other parents of seniors on Gig Harbor, Ballard, Jackson and Puyallup’s teams, felt robbed of the chance to watch their kids play high school baseball one last time.
“If you finish third or fourth, it doesn’t matter,” Kelley said. “The next game is a celebratory game. It gives kids the chance to have that cathartic last game as teammates. The parents could cheer them, clap for them for a long time. They never got a chance to play that last game.”
First-year Gig Harbor coach Ben Sleeter also felt the seniors were robbed of the opportunity to play their last game together.
“One of the rewards for making the final four is that our kids know when the season ends,” he said. “There’s two games in front of them. That’s an important thing. … To find out at 10:30 at night in a hotel room that it’s over, that was brutal.
“We had guys that were set to play the next day, their last high school game. That was ripped away from them.”
Ballard’s team was staying at the same hotel in Toppenish as Gig Harbor. Ballard coach Doug Montgomery said he was talking with Sleeter in the hotel lobby at 11 p.m. on Friday, trying to figure out how the two teams could still play the game against each other the next day.
“I wanted one more game with our 11 seniors that are graduating,” he said. “I wanted to end the season on a win. When I told my dad who was there, our assistants, the parents, everyone’s first response was, ‘Just find us a field.’ There’s so many high school fields in Yakima.
“We’re here, we already paid for the hotel. It didn’t feel like (the WIAA) took the necessary steps to make it happen.”
In a phone interview on Monday, WIAA executive director Mick Hoffman told The News Tribune the WIAA tried to find a suitable high school venue to host the consolation games the next day, but the fields weren’t ready to host the games, since the season had ended a week or two earlier for the local teams.
“We were told a lot of those (local high school teams in Yakima) hadn’t been maintaining their fields to the level they’d need to be,” he said. “Obviously, we don’t want to cancel their kids’ games. We were exhausting all opportunities to try to come up with an alternative playsite to play those games.”
Hoffman said he felt teams that may have underperformed on the field may have unfairly directed their anger toward the WIAA.
“We had a couple teams show up with high expectations that didn’t perform,” he said. “I think that amplifies the angst.”
Montgomery said at the team’s end-of-season banquet last week, there was some lingering emotion from what transpired.
“I think there was still some resentment,” he said. “We didn’t find a good conclusion to it.”
WAS PARKER FALLER FIELD A SUITABLE VENUE?
Puyallup coach Marc Wiese alleged the WIAA knew about the stadium’s lighting issues prior to hosting the event. Hoffman rebutted the claim.
“No, I’ve asked,” Hoffman said. “I’ve heard that rumor, too. Not at all.”
Hoffman said a separate issue with the lights had occurred a week or so prior, during a district baseball game. A player hit a foul ball and it hit a transformer. Hoffman said electricians came out in the following days and fixed the issue. Hoffman said the WIAA conducted a check three days before Friday’s semifinal games and everything was in working order.
“Everything was working fine as of Tuesday,” he said.
Hoffman said that longtime Yakima tournament organizer and youth sports supporter Mel Moore, who helps the WIAA run the site, knew nothing of lighting issues beforehand.
Last year’s 3A and 4A state semifinals and championship games were played at Gesa Stadium in Pasco, home of the Tri-City Dust Devils, the High-A affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels. Parker Faller Field, which is smaller and more dated, felt to many like a downgrade this year.
Sleeter, the Gig Harbor coach, was careful not to direct any criticism toward the staffers and volunteers in Yakima who put in time and effort into having the field ready to host the games. But he wishes the games were played at a larger, more modern venue.
“This is a big event,” he said. “In my mind, it should be at UW, WSU, Gonzaga. … If it was me, you don’t get a better venue than (Triple-A Tacoma Rainiers’) Cheney Stadium. … Let’s raise the standard a little bit.”
Hoffman, who defended Parker Faller Field as “absolutely suitable,” said the availability of baseball stadiums around the state is dependent on minor league baseball schedules and which teams have home games during the WIAA’s target dates, which is why the WIAA’s state tournaments sites move from year to year. This year, Gesa Stadium was unavailable, as were several other minor league stadiums, which caused the WIAA to look to community colleges and smaller parks.
“There’s a bid process,” Hoffman said. “We send out invites to bid the event to all the community colleges, visitors groups, tourism groups. We’re searching everywhere.”
As for working with the universities — UW, WSU and Gonzaga come to mind as suitably-sized venues — Hoffman said it can be more challenging than working with minor league teams.
“They’re big institutions,” he said. “There’s a lot of bureaucracy to get there. They know the bids are coming. They get a lot of turnover in parts of their athletic offices.”
Everyone, of course, is ultimately fine. At the end of the day, the third/fourth place games are merely consolation games. Still, there remains a sense that something was taken from the seniors on those teams. While some of the baseball players will be in summer league teams and a few will go on to play in college, their time of playing high school baseball together came to an abrupt end.
“There’s some magic to playing on a high school team that doesn’t happen playing on a mercenary summer league team,” Steve Kelley said. “You’re messing with a memory these kids will carry with them for the rest of their lives.”
Hoffman reiterated the WIAA didn’t make the decision to cancel games lightly.
“It was an unfortunate incident,” he said. “It’s absolutely not what we wanted. We hear rumors about gamesmanship, all this other speculation. What is fact is that we played at the sites of people who engaged in the bid process. We had people on site working their tails off. We had an unfortunate incident come up with lighting that cost us two third-place games.”
This story was originally published June 10, 2025 at 12:59 PM.
