Coupeville Sports

Josh Bayne had three hits and three RBI Friday. (John Fisken photo)

Aaaaaaaa-goooooooo-nyyyyyyyyyyyy.

Three outs away from a sweep of its season-opening three-game series against arch-rival South Whidbey, the Coupeville High School baseball squad couldn’t get the door all the way slammed.

Instead, they surrendered four runs in the bottom of the seventh Friday, losing 10-9 on a walk-off, two-out, two-run single.

Still, the Wolves, now 2-1 on the season, did win the series and will hold a tiebreaker over the Falcons, the only other 1A school to play baseball in the Cascade Conference. King’s doesn’t play baseball, while the other five league schools are 2A.

Coupeville will hit the road for non-conference games at Concrete and Nooksack Valley next week before returning to league play against the biggest baddie in all the land, Archbishop Thomas Murphy.

The game started slowly Friday, got pretty awesome for a stretch, then slipped away piece by piece.

The Wolves went with sophomore CJ Smith on the mound, and he didn’t have the command he had shown out of the bullpen in a CHS win Thursday.

After a rough first inning, in which he surrendered three runs, he settled down, but trailed 4-0 when he turned the ball over to Wade Schaef in the fourth.

After scraping together a run on an Aaron Trumbull double and Kurtis Smith single, Coupeville seemingly blew the game open with an eight-run fifth inning.

The Wolves used three hits, five walks and a crucial South Whidbey error to amass the runs. Morgan Payne (two-run single) and Josh Bayne (three-run double) delivered the biggest blows.

With Schaef cruising into the sixth inning, Coupeville seemed primed for the sweep, but the plucky Falcons refused to go away.

South Whidbey cut the margin to 9-6 going into the seventh, then jumped on mental errors by the Wolves to get two more in the bottom of the seventh.

Clinging to a 9-8 lead, with runners at second and third and two outs, Coupeville still had a chance to escape.

But it wasn’t to be, as the Falcon cleanup hitter became a hometown hero with a textbook single into left center to score the tying and winning runs.

Bayne paced the Wolves with three hits and three RBI, while Trumbull added two hits and two runs.

While he would have preferred getting back on the bus with a win, CHS coach Willie Smith came away mostly pleased with how his team handled the season-opening series.

“Although we lost, we did take the series and we had a lot of good things happen over the past three games,” Smith said. “We still have some work to do, as we struck out far too much today, mostly looking, and we still need to be able to put a team away when we have them on the ropes.

“But I feel like we put ourselves in a good position league-wise,” he added. “The areas we need to work on are definitely areas which we can fix.”