Coupeville Sports

   Senior catcher Cole Payne is a rock behind the plate for the Wolves. (John Fisken photos)

Freshman Matt Hilborn tossed a perfect seventh in his high school debut.

First games are tricky things.

When you’re a brand new coach stepping on the field for the first time, you can never fully know what to expect.

Jim Waller, currently the Sports Editor at the Whidbey News-Times, got ten-runned during his first game at the helm of the Oak Harbor High School baseball squad.

30 years, 300+ wins and one induction into the Washington State High School Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame later, and he recovered quite nicely.

Still, he remembers that game like it was yesterday.

Will the same hold true for Marc Aparicio?

Only time will tell.

The Coupeville High School grad, who once starred on the diamond for the Wolves, made his official debut Monday as their new head coach.

Like Waller, he took a loss, but this one was a tense one-run affair that ended with the tying run just 90 feet away.

Unfortunately for Aparicio and Coupeville, even though they got Joey Lippo to third with no outs in the bottom of the seventh, they couldn’t bring him home, letting Sultan slide away with a 6-5 non-conference win on Opening Day.

Fielding a very young squad — the Wolves had three freshmen and three sophomores in the starting lineup — CHS still came out aggressively.

Cole Payne, one of only two senior starters, knocked in sophomore Hunter Smith in the first to stake Coupeville to a 1-0 lead.

After falling behind 2-1, the Wolves rebounded with their best effort in the third, plating four base-runners, with the big hit, a double, coming from freshman Dane Lucero.

Coupeville couldn’t hold the lead, though, giving up three in the fourth to tie things up, then surrendering a go-ahead run in the fifth.

The Wolves made a bid to send the game into extra innings with a strong final inning.

After freshman reliever Matt Hilborn retired the side one-two-three in his debut, Lippo led off the bottom half of the seventh with a shot that was bobbled by a Turk defender.

Eventually perched on third, he was stranded, however, as Sultan’s hurler closed the game with a pair of strikeouts packaged around a come-backer.

While his squad lost, Aparicio came away largely happy with what he saw in his first go-around.

“We had a couple of errors in the beginning but recovered well,” he said. “I thought we got strong pitching from CJ (Smith), Hunter and Hilborn.

“My philosophy is to have us be aggressive on the bases and we were,” he added. “We missed a few signals, but we’ll work on that.”

Coupeville will hop right back into the thick of things with a home-and-away non-conference series against Concrete. Wednesday’s game (4:15 PM) is on Whidbey, followed by a road trip Friday.