No one on the Colleyville Heritage baseball team had ever played in a playoff game before last week. The team played without its top two hitters — Trent Bower and Xavier Rosado — for key parts of the season because of injuries.
And Heritage endured a seven-game losing streak that was part of a 2-5 start in District 7-5A. But the team is still alive in the playoffs, even after being three outs from elimination Saturday.
After losing Game 1 of a best-of-3 first-round series against Midlothian and bouncing back for a 4-2 win in Game 2, Colleyville Heritage trailed 3-1 going to the bottom of the seventh in Game 3 on Saturday. Despite the lack of any postseason experience, Heritage didn’t panic.
What followed was a season-saving three-run rally in the final inning that ended with a walk-off sacrifice fly by Cash Lyle that scored Grant Rhodes and gave Colleyville Heritage a 4-3 win. Weston Ballard had a sacrifice fly earlier in that inning to get Colleyville Heritage within 3-2, then a one-out RBI single by Bower tied it before a walk loaded the bases and set the stage for Lyle’s game-winner.
“We were constantly getting traffic on the bases and just couldn’t quite get that run across,” Colleyville Heritage coach Chris McMullen said. “I think our guys were confident going into the last inning. We’ve been down before in tournament games and have come back to win, so it’s not a position our guys were unfamiliar with.”
Texas signee Cooper Powell was the star in the Game 2 win, pitching a complete-game two-hitter and striking out 13. In Game 3, Bower was 2-for-4 with two RBIs and Lyle earned the win by pitching six scoreless innings of relief.
Colleyville Heritage (19-15), the No. 3 seed from District 7-5A, will face 5-5A champion Aledo in a best-of-3 area-round series that begins at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Saginaw Chisholm Trail.
Before this season, Colleyville Heritage had not made the playoffs since 2019. That was the year Heritage won the Class 5A state title with a team led by shortstop Bobby Witt Jr., the 2019 Gatorade National Player of the Year who was the No. 2 pick in that year’s draft and is now a rising star with the Kansas City Royals.
There was plenty of adversity during the season, as Bower missed almost six weeks with a broken collarbone and Rosado suffered a lower back injury after the second week of district play and didn’t return until the playoffs. Not only was Bower hitting close to .440 when he was injured, but the team had been counting on him to be either a starting pitcher or the closer in district games.
The team was 9-14 after a 3-0 loss to Richland on April 2, its 11th loss in 13 games. But a team meeting after that game sparked a turnaround and Colleyville Heritage is 10-1 since.
“We talked about what adjustments we needed to make as coaches,” McMullen said. “The players were open and gave us good feedback about what they felt like they needed from us in practice preparations to get them to play at a higher level.”
Colleyville Heritage lost seven straight games from March 7 through March 14, but three of those were to Tomball and Grapevine, now ranked No. 2 in the state in Class 6A and 5A, respectively. Two of those games were one-run losses, and in the other, Heritage was within 3-2 going into the final inning before losing 8-2.
Those were signs that Colleyville Heritage had the talent to go on a big run, as was its split of two district games with 2023 5A state runner-up Argyle. In the two games against Argyle, Heritage starting pitchers Jobe Reed and Powell combined to allow one run and strike out 18.
“We have two of the best starters in the state,” McMullen said. “We knew from the get-go that we have enough starting pitching to keep us in ballgames.”
McMullen is in his first year as Heritage’s coach after spending eight years at Mansfield Legacy. He is the only baseball coach in Mansfield ISD history to lead a team to the UIL state tournament, taking Legacy to the 5A semifinals in 2022.
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