McLean baseball team hopes to finally win elusive region title

Walk by the McLean weight room, and you might wonder if the school's baseball players are passing around a virus, given all the loud sneezes coming out of there. Except they're not sneezes.

During their "10 minutes of hell" workout finale, the Highlanders shout out any number of motivational phrases. One of them is "Ash-ooh!," a reference to Centreville left-hander Ryan Ashooh, the owner of the 1-0 win over McLean last year in the first round of the Virginia AAA Northern Region tournament that abruptly ended the Liberty District champions' season.

The Highlanders' personalized grunts serve as a reminder and a declaration that they plan to be in the playoffs for the long haul this season.

"It was such a terrible feeling that we just don't want that to happen again," senior catcher-pitcher Denis Buckley said. "It's great for us this year. In a way, it was one of the best things that could have happened."

Third-ranked McLean, 18-5 a year ago, has everything a region title contender could want. The Highlanders have 17 returning players (including a core of guys who won the 2006 Babe Ruth Southeast Regional), every pitcher who threw an inning last season (including All-Met right-hander Sean Fitzgerald), and an impact transfer (sophomore pitcher-infielder Josh Sborz from rival Langley). They also have what could be a validating or humbling spring break tournament trip to San Diego and the lingering bitter disappointment of that early playoff exit last season.

All the Highlanders lack is a track record. Open since the 1950s, McLean has never won the region baseball title. In fact, the only McLean boys' team, in any sport, to win a region crown since 1980 was the football team in 1995, when baseball Coach John Thomas attended the school.

"McLean hasn't typically been one of the schools that goes very far in tournament play," senior outfielder Riley Beiro said. "In anything, really."

So the program that hasn't won a region title is the preseason favorite to win a region title, based on the region coaches' poll, and is popping up in state and national rankings. Those are high expectations for a senior class that is 0-3 in the region tournament and not accustomed to the scrutiny.

"I'm sure that half of them go home and Google themselves every day," joked Thomas, who thinks the Highlanders have the maturity to stay grounded.

In his fifth year as coach, Thomas made it a point to coach many of the future McLean players on an eighth-grade team to establish relationships and to ward off interested private schools. He knew then that this would be a bountiful senior class.

"We were lucky to get all of them," Thomas said.

And the Highlanders were fortunate that Sborz showed up. He will bolster an already stellar pitching staff and has been inserted into the sixth spot in the batting order. Sborz's brother, Jay, a right-handed pitcher, was a second-round draft pick by the Detroit Tigers in 2003 out of Langley.

The core of the team is the Highlanders' four college-bound players: Fitzgerald (Notre Dame), Buckley (Charleston Southern), infielder Chris Russo (Virginia Military Institute) and Beiro, a preferred walk-on for football at Virginia Tech. They are the ones who field the most questions about the team's prospects this season.

Fitzgerald, who already owns the school's career record for pitching wins, said the question most frequently posed to him around school is, "Are you guys going to win states?"

Rolling over Marshall and Jefferson by a combined 21-0 score to start the season is unlikely to quell such inquiries.

"It's good to know that we're known," Buckley said. "But it doesn't really mean anything. We know that. We're just trying to get to the same spot we were in last year, and a better result."