JV baseball completes the perfect season

The Wimberley Texans’ junior varsity baseball team rolled through the recent 2019 season with win after win as they had built an almost unbelievable record of 22 wins and no losses. “After we evaluated the players,” Wimberley junior varsity baseball coach Brian Milam explained, ”we saw we had real talent to form the team. So, one day I showed the boys our schedule and told them, “Guys, we’re going to win every game!”

As it turned out, he was right.

The whole scenario may sound like a boy’s dream with no reality or a kids’ sports movie. But, this story was about real players, real victories and real parents who supported their sons’ ambitions.

Coach Milam recently related the story of his teams’ fantastic 2019 season when they won 22 games and lost none. Although Wimberley is a 4A school, the Texans beat 6A Leander’s JV nine and even defeated the varsity 4A squads from Harper and Gonzales.

“At the beginning of the season, I had no idea what we had for players,” Milam stated. “Soon, I found that we had a solid combination of pitching, hitting and fielding. To win games, a baseball team needs good fundamentals of hitting, fielding and pitching. We had them all! As coaches, we just needed to bring them together to play as a team.”

“We soon recognized three natural leaders in this bunch of young players. Fletcher Stauffer, Jacob Quartucci and Ryan Rubio moved to the front and the rest of the players accepted them as the leaders. Baseball tends to humble individuals and bring them back to the team concept of ‘I’m not alone because I’m just one part of a team.’

“I wanted them to know from the very beginning that we could win. Sometimes in baseball you lose a game or two, then that attitude of losing begins to set in. From the very beginning, we kept letting them know that losing was not acceptable. But we were blessed with the players who we could win with.

“The pitching and the hitting always came through for us,” Milan praised. Also, our defense played solidly so we didn’t give up runs on errors. But, what got us through with so many wins was our pitching staff of Ryan Rubio (7-0), Fletcher Stauffer (6-0) Jacob Quartucci (5-0) and Ryland Molinare (4-0).

For the Texan JV team, the toughest game this year came against Leander, a 6A team with a junior-loaded JV squad while the Wimberley starting nine were all sophomores and two freshmen. “It was a tough a game,” the coach said. ” “We got key base hits and solid pitching. It came down to a walk-off hit by Kyle Yeatter that drove in the winning run.”

“The other great part of this story is the support we got all season from the parents,” Milan said. “For example, Tami Schroeder and Carla Latz helped so much during the season as they arranged team meals. Another mom, Joanna Rubio, helped in so many ways. As the season rolled on, the support from the parents seemed to grow stronger game by game. Maybe the best part about the parent involvement was the lack of any negativity from the parents as they supported fair play from all teams.”

The Wimberley varsity team continues to play as they recently won a share of the bi-district championship. With the strong showing of this year’s junior varsity squad moving up next Spring, the Texans could keep winning trophies in 2020 and years to come.