Monroeville Junior Legion team hopes to make playoff push this summer

The Monroeville Junior Legion baseball team dropped the first two games of its Westmoreland County Youth Legion season but quickly got on the winning track in what is expected to be a competitive run to the playoffs.

Wins over Bushy Run, 3-2 on May 29; Uniontown, 10-2 on June 2; and Smithfield Fairchance, 14-3 on June 3 put the team in a positive frame of mind.

Despite a tough shutout loss to 14th Ward last Tuesday, Monroeville coach Mark Rawls says things are coming together as the team hopes to make some noise when postseason opportunities present themselves.

“The most important thing is the players understand the brand of baseball Monroeville Post 820 needs to play,” Rawls said.

“That comes with a toughness and grittiness while competing every single pitch and making sure we’re not looking for other teams to give us wins. We want to play to the level where we’re going out and taking wins. We know that all of the competition in the Westmoreland County Youth Legion is going to be at a high level. We have to come ready to play every single game if we are going to be successful. That is the expectation this team has built from the start.”

Monroeville will be busy through the end of his month with games remaining against Belle Vernon, 14th Ward, Kiski, Elizabeth Forward and Connellsville.

Monroeville again consists mostly of players who recently completed their spring high school seasons at Gateway: Roman Jennings, Colin Graves, Ryan Deselich, Shane Demchak, Tyler Feeser, Sid Yadav, Evan Pelc, Joey Pachete, Will Donaldson, Nathan Redman, Braden Washington and Myles Holyfield.

While a majority of the Monroeville players are Gateway products, the coach’s son, Micah Rawls, comes to the team after another spring high school season at Central Catholic.

“With Micah, he goes to a different school, but he grew up playing Little League baseball with a lot of the Gateway kids,” coach Rawls said.

“The assimilation each summer is pretty natural.”

Three players from Plum — Michael Roberts, Vincent Bondarenka and Marques Brown — also joined the team for this summer when Plum decided not to field a team in the league.

“Ever since the first day of practice, we’ve talked about us being one solid team, no matter where we all come from,” coach Rawls said.

“All the practices and games have built our identity to the point where we are excited to see how far we can get. The Plum guys were excited to come over and remain in a competitive environment. As a coach, it is nice to see all of that come together and see them build that natural chemistry.”

Coach Rawls said communication amongst the players on the field is a key strength of the team.

“The more the team is communicating with each other rather than those instructions coming from the coach the better off they will be,” he said.

“They’ve been pretty vocal on the field with each other about what they are seeing, what we need to be doing with the baseball, and alerting each other about different things on the base paths or in the field that one person might not see. It all comes down to everyone being on the same page.”

Coach Rawls said he was impressed with the contagious hitting in a few of the early season wins where one guy would get hot and others followed suit.

“It goes back to making sure we’re having competitive at-bats against whoever we are facing,” he said.

“It is infectious among all of the hitters in the lineup to where they know they have to take that same approach to put runs on the board to get victories.”

With the redistricting at the state level, the league’s teams, Rawls said, will head to their respective district playoffs at the conclusion of the regular season to see who will then advance to regionals.

Monroeville will join a playoff tournament with 14th Ward, Elizabeth Forward, Smithfield Fairchance, Belle Vernon, Uniontown and Connellsville.

“With the schedule, we know we have a tough road ahead of us as we have the goal of continuing the success Monroeville Legion has had over the past 10 years here of making it to regionals and states a couple of times,” coach Rawls said.