Coyotes try to make most of difficult year

As a rocky first year as baseball coach at the College of Southern Nevada winds down, Nick Garritano isn't in the mood to sugarcoat things.

"I can't sit here and say that it's been a smooth ride from Day One," Garritano said before a practice last week at Morse Stadium. "It's been a trying year, not just for coaches and not just for kids, but for the program in general. It's been a really rough year. It's obvious."

CSN (31-25) finished fourth in the six-team Scenic West Athletic Conference this season and will be the No. 4 seed in the National Junior College Athletic Association Region 18 Tournament, which begins today in Carson City.

It has been quite a tumble for a program that only last spring was the talk of JC baseball.

Led by 17-year-old wunderkind and Sports Illustrated cover boy Bryce Harper, the Coyotes were regularly featured on ESPN and the MLB Network en route to a 52-16 record and NJCAA Western District championship.

Harper, who hit .443 with 31 home runs and 98 RBIs in 66 games, won the Golden Spikes Award as the nation's top amateur baseball player and was the first pick in June's major league draft by the Washington Nationals, earning a five-year contract worth $9.9 million.

Then the bottom began to fall out for CSN, which had claimed six of the last eight SWAC titles.

First, coach Tim Chambers, who built the program from scratch beginning in 2000 and coached the Coyotes to the 2003 NJCAA national championship, left to become UNLV's coach.

Chambers' replacement, Chris Sheff, seemed a natural fit after coaching Bishop Gorman to five straight state 4A titles and Baseball America's mythical national championship in 2009.

But just four months later, Sheff was out amid allegations of training irregularities and conditioning practices.

Garritano, who won two state titles and compiled a 315-118 record in 12 years as coach at Green Valley High School, took over only three months before the start of the 2011 season.

Then, a month after Garritano accepted his "dream job," CSN was put on probation by the NJCAA for violations under Sheff and docked 10 of its 24 scholarships for both the 2012 and 2013 seasons.

Forget about appearing on ESPN or being featured in Sports Illustrated. Garritano's first order of business was to soothe hurt feelings and build trust with players he didn't recruit, not to mention trying to field a respectable team.

"It's a brand-new picture out here," Garritano said. "Those kids from last year are gone. We basically have one kid (pitcher Taylor Jones) who contributed on that team. The good thing is that the administration here has consistently reminded me that my job here has been to steady the ship."

It hasn't been easy, but Garritano, a former star place-kicker at UNLV who was inducted into the school's Athletics Hall of Fame in October, seems to have done just that.

"They've laid a good foundation," Garritano said. "We haven't had many problems. Let's put it this way: I don't have anything to elaborate on. Every team has a little bit of turmoil. We're no different than any team in the country. But there haven't been any major discipline problems and our kids have acted right. They've respected the school and respected the program. I can't ask anything more of them."

"It's been a fun year," said Jones, who signed a letter of intent with Utah Valley College. "It was a little different coming in and being a sophomore. I've had three coaches in the past two years. But Coach Garritano has come in and done a good job of getting everybody prepared and doing the best with what we have."

Now Garritano and his short-handed squad, which suits up just 23 players, only 19 on scholarship, turn their attention to this week's NJCAA Region 18 tournament. The Coyotes open against No. 5 seed College of Eastern Utah (19-39) at 12:30 p.m. today, with the winner getting top seed Western Nevada College (44-11), which has a first-round bye, at 9 a.m. Thursday.

"One thing about baseball in a tournament, it's not as if you are more physical and you're going to dominate a team like in football," Garritano said. "You get one bounce here or one bounce there."

"I think the team has come together here at the end of the season," CSN sophomore third baseman Ray Daniels said. "I think that's what makes us a scary team going into this tournament. We really have nothing to lose. No one expects us to win it."

"We could have easily laid down and just gave up on the year," Jones said. "But the team is fighting through and working hard every day to get better. I hope we go into this tournament with a little something to prove. We've been through so much adversity."

The Coyotes enter the tournament playing some of their best baseball of the season. CSN has won eight in a row after sweeping a four-game series at Eastern Utah.

"We're not quitting on this year," Garritano said. "There's a big opportunity for us. This could be a magical win for these kids who went through a really tough time in their lives this year. If they can somehow win some games in that tournament and somehow win that tournament, they can really put a magical end on this thing."

Contact reporter Steve Guiremand at sguiremand@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4534.