Dropping their regular-season finale as hard as they did Saturday wasn’t how the Bobcats wanted to bolt into the 2025 Class 2A State Tournament. But having gone into their game at nonleague Olathe among the classification’s top 20 teams in CHSAA’s Selection & Seeding Index, Ignacio’s place in the imminent playoffs was secure.
On Wednesday, Ignacio was awarded the No. 17 seed in the bracket’s initial Round of 32. Head coach Isiah Valdez’s crew will begin postseason play this Saturday, against No. 16 Wray, and do so in Arvada at Forge Christian High School. First pitch is set for 10 a.m., and the winner will then face the 12:30 p.m. game’s survivor – either top-seeded FCHS or No. 32 Denver Manual – at 3 p.m.
Having won three straight before falling 11-1 to OHS in five innings, the 2A/1A San Juan Basin League champion Bobcats will hit the Metro Area standing 15-5 overall, having also lost by single digits to SJBL rival Nucla and to 3A Bayfield, but also having been blown out in two late-March, five-inning affairs by eventual 2A Southern Peaks champ Monte Vista.
“We’ve got a young team, so they’ve just got to have a lot of confidence out there,” Valdez had said earlier this season. “With a team like this, it’s important to make sure you build up their confidence and make sure that they stay positive. Let them know that mistakes are going to be made, but that’s baseball. So try to make the plays that we can, and the ones we can’t … we’ve just got to move on from and keep playing.”
WHS, meanwhile, managed to close out regular-season work, bouncing back from a 12-9 loss on Saturday at nonleague Limon with two lopsided Lower Platte victories (17-1 and 12-0) on Monday at Sedgwick County. The sweep bumped Wray up to a fourth-place 5-5 in 2A LPAA action, and to an unassuming 11-11 overall.
However, boss Brett Vlasin’s fast-rising Eagles, having also swept home doubleheaders against Kansas programs Decatur Community (Oberlin) and Goodland, are now 6-1 in May and 7-1 since walloping Wiggins in the second game of a 4/26 away pair.
Forge (formerly Faith) Christian, meanwhile, was blanked by both Kersey Platte Valley and Loveland Resurrection Christian – but only gave up eight runs total – in its last regular-season outings but, after winning the 3A/2A Metro and still finishing 19-4 overall, will happily welcome all comers. Especially considering that in ’24, the Fury (20-7 overall last spring) reached the state tournament’s double-elimination Great Eight phase, only to then lose twice – to eventual state champion Eaton, then to RCS – by a combined two runs.
Manual, placed third overall in the 3A/2A City League, and ended up 13-8 overall after losing 9-3 to Denver-based 3A Abraham Lincoln in the teams’ Monday regular-season finale. Before that the recharged Thunderbolts – which went just 1-21 in 2024 and finished dead last in the 3A Metro – had won all four of their May games, though three were at home.
