Napa High to host first-ever Jack Matthews Invitational in spring of 2021
By Kyle Foster
Twitter: @NapaKyle @NapaSportsNews
There’s nothing like a baseball tournament, especially a new one.
That will be the case next spring when Napa High hosts the first-ever Jack Matthews Invitational. After all, the name of this makes so much sense. Jack Matthews is the grandfather of Napa High head coach Jason Chatham. Matthews is a World War II veteran who was part of the Normandy invasion on June 6th, 1944. Matthews has been a resident at the Veterans Home in Yountville for 15 years.
“I’m one of the only males not to have served in the military. My father served in Vietnam. My grandfather served in World War II,” he pointed out. “He doesn’t talk about it a lot. He’s been living at the Vets Home for 15 years. He’s very humble. He doesn’t want to talk about it. But I know that he manned an M-51 Anti-Aircraft gun, called the sky sweeper. He did that in the Military and then came out of the Military and played football at Willam & Mary and was a tight end at Willam and Mary, a big-time sports guy. Forever he was the district administrator for District 52, which is south of San Francisco. He was the Little League administrator there. As a kid, it was all about baseball all the time. We always talked baseball and went to Giants games. He threw out the first pitch. One time he got me in the dugout, it was how I became a Giants fan.”
The event will take place at Cleve Borman Field at the Yountville Veteran’s Home and at Napa High’s Mount Field. It will span three days from April 1st through 3rd. As of now, that’s Spring Break for the Napa Valley Unified School District. Cleve Borman Field hasn’t hosted high school baseball since the spring of 2018. In the time since it’s been the host of the Napa Valley Baseball Club.
“I think it’s a perfect way to do it,” Chatham explained. “In theory, that should eliminate most home-field advantage, even though we could end up playing a game at Mount Field, which again, I love. There’s nothing better than playing at Mount. I just feel like it’s the right experience for the right time. Getting high school baseball there again, it’s big. The vets love it, they love to go to games. It’s a big deal.”
State and local health guidelines regarding COVID-19 will dictate whether or not games will be played with fans in attendance and if the Vets Home will be used as a tournament venue. The California Veterans Home at Yountville hasn’t been accessible to the public since the onslaught of the pandemic in March, which would likely mean the county would have to be moved the current red tier of the reopening plan to the yellow. Napa County could be moved to the orange tier next week based on the numbers. The good news is the tournament is still seven months away and a lot can change between now and then.
If all goes well, the tournament could expand from six teams to an eight or 16-team field in the future.
“Things will have to fall into place. We’ll have to make sure we can get the Vets Home again in the future and want to make sure it works out for the teams,” Chatham said of possible future plans for the event. “I don’t see any reason why not. We have the fields, we’ve got a couple of really good fields right here. Maybe it’s even possible to reach out to Vintage and see if we could use their field as well if the thing got big enough down the road. Maybe that would be a possibility as well. Justin-Siena same thing. We have some quality opponents and quality fields in this area and it would be nice to make this a bigger deal.”
Besides Napa, the field will be very balanced. The heavyweights of the field will be Clayton Valley of Concord and Campolindo-Moraga.
This will provide a chance for Napa to play some of the most elite teams in the CIF North Coast Section. It will also help their strength of schedule, which is something that will help them when it comes to qualifying for the playoffs.
“That’s our goal overall is to be in the playoffs,” Chatham said. “I’m trying to look at it as if you can play playoff baseball before you get to the playoffs, then it gives you experience, and based on what our program looked (like) last year, I feel we’re ready for the playoffs. I feel that our program has turned a major corner and we’re trending in the right direction.”
Other teams in the field include Fairfield, Armijo-Fairfield, and Rancho Cotate-Rohnert Park. Last season, Armijo handed the Grizzlies their only loss of the short season.
Looking back on a short 2020 season
Despite the fact that last season was cut short in April due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Grizzlies had a very successful season.
They finished the season with a 4-1 record. They had come from behind victories over St. Helena and Vanden-Fairfield.
Napa graduated nine players from last season’s roster.
“Behind the scenes, the coaches were excited,” Chatham said about the 2020 season. “We didn’t want to tell the players how good they were because if you start telling the players how good they are, then they start believing the hype a little bit. Once you believe the hype on yourself, it becomes dangerous because you don’t do the things that it took to get you there. So, we told our players that they could be good. But we would powwow after practice and say ‘these guys are ready. These guys are ready to get after it.’ We kept it quiet because we didn’t want to build them up too big yet and we wanted to let them see it for themselves.
“There was a turning point maybe six, seven practices in where the players said ‘we’re going to win’,” Chatham continued. “We looked at each other and the coaches were like ‘yeah, we’re going to be successful.’ That feeling that we had, it would’ve carried over because that’s how sports work.”
Previewing the CIF’s 2020-21 schedule
Back on July 20th, the CIF announced that the regular three-season sport model would be condensed to two seasons for the 2021 school year.
The reason for the change was because many schools would be doing online learning for the fall semester due to a rise of Coronavirus cases around the state.
The move to a two-season model is going to create many logistical problems for athletes, coaches, and athletic directors.
“(Athletic Director) Darci (Ward) has asked all the coaches to be flexible,” Chatham explained. “That means that we need to work together in sharing athletes where appropriate and that’s not normally something we would do. Normally, when you’re playing baseball, you’re playing baseball. When you’re playing basketball, you’re playing basketball. But this year, that could mean that we’re sharing some guys. That could mean that my catcher is the point guard and that’s possible that happens.”
It certainly will take lots of flexibility with winter sports and spring sports playing during the same season.
Also in 2021, the Vine Valley Athletic League is planning to have a postseason tournament with the top four teams return. It will take place at Arnold Field in Sonoma.
Only select teams have been allowed to practice. Baseball hasn’t been one of them. As of now, there’s still no timetable set as to when Napa can practice again.
