PLEASANT HILL – After the Pleasant Hill Billies baseball team fell to the Creswell Bulldogs 12-10 in Game One of its doubleheader, first-year head coach Boone Casarez pulled his team together for a long huddle before Game Two.
With his players clustered around him, he noted that the loss was painful and then outlined the main aspects they needed for a win: speed, pace, consistency, and, most importantly, a supportive culture.
The pep talk was a success – the Billies came back with a 5-4 victory against the Bulldogs in Game Two when they scored 6 runs from the third through the fifth innings.
“They did a better job picking each other up, too,” Casarez said after the second game. “Especially after an error happened, or a miscue, or a bad at-bat. In Game One, we had a few guys getting on each other or just quitting a little bit.”
This key aspect of Casarez’s pep talk – a supportive and uplifting team culture – also represents a larger philosophy that Casarez hopes to instill in the program for generations to come: integrity.
“We want to be elite here,” Casarez said. “I tell the kids in everything that we do – no matter if it’s our grades, our home life, our homework, or brushing our teeth – we want to be elite in everything. And then when we come to the baseball field, we just expect ourselves to be elite. Are we elite athletes? Probably not. But do we want to be elite all the time? Absolutely.
Casarez
“Then, it eventually carries into life. If all these guys in 10 years call me and tell me when they’re getting married or having kids, I’ve succeeded here,” he said. “Because the game is gonna end at some point, but the relationships and the life foundations that they can learn from baseball will carry on with them. So that’s my goal – to help these kids become men, and then when they move on, be able to attack life head on.”
Small beginnings
Casarez said he has been playing since he was in a diaper, and he is well-versed in the knowledge of the game, but his playing experience mostly revolves around playing at Lane Community College from 2015-17 after he graduated from Lowell High School in ’11.
“I got hurt out of high school,” He said. “So I stopped playing baseball and worked instead. And then we had our oldest daughter, and the job I was doing at the time wasn’t something that was for me. So then I went back to school to try to be a teacher or something. And I thought, ‘Well, if I’m going back to school, then I’m playing baseball,’”
Casarez’s college career was short-lived as his family grew, and he began to value his presence in family life more.
“When I was playing in school, I was married and had a kid,” Casarez said. “At some point, you have to grow up and be a husband and be a dad.”
From there, Casarez had multiple coaching stints in sports such as wrestling, football, and baseball at different schools of various sizes. Many of these opportunities were encouraged by his brothers: Pleasant Hill alumni Lincoln Casarez (2014) and Noah Casarez (’16).
“I just dabbled in and out a bit,” Casarez said. “I helped my brothers when they were here, and at other schools as well. In general, I’ve been coaching since I got out of high school in 2011 with my wrestling. Also, I’ve helped out with football at Lowell as well as wrestling here in Pleasant Hill. Although with wrestling here, it was never actually ‘coaching.’ It would be more like, ‘Come for a day.’
“Then, we moved to Lowell in 2018, 2019, somewhere in there,” he recalled. “We coached wrestling there until last year and then coached baseball there for two years. So this is my first time in 3A … but of course I’ve coached wrestling for 6A before.”
Billies Baseball
Casarez left the Class 2A Lowell Red Devils with a 20-24 coaching record from 2023-24; he was named the conference baseball coach of the year last season. When asked why he chose Pleasant Hill, he said he thinks of Pleasant Hill as a “baseball school.”
“When you drive by here, this is what you see,” Casarez said while looking at the field. “Pleasant Hill is, to me, known as a baseball school, and I just love the game of baseball. If you’re going to coach baseball, there’s no better place to be. We have great facilities. We have a great community that loves baseball … Guess I thought if I’m coaching baseball and the opportunity is to be here, this is a job that I’m here forever, until the Lord calls me somewhere else. There’s nowhere else to go – a bigger school doesn’t entice me. This is as good as it gets for high school baseball.”
As the Billies move through their Mountain Valley Conference schedule, Casarez hopes that the Game Two victory will provide momentum in their second week of league play. He also hopes to sustain the outline of their goals, which are to play competitive baseball for seven innings, focus on growing young talent, and refine the strength of senior leadership. In addition, after coming out of a tough non-league schedule with a 4-5 record, he said he hopes the players have found a rhythm.
“We played a really tough non-league schedule,” Casarez said. “We do look at it like two different seasons. Though it was a little disappointing, we’re gonna be okay. We also did some really good things. We started finding out who our guys were.
“In the first three, four games, we didn’t know who our shortstop was, who our second baseman was, center field – any of that. Now we’re starting to understand who plays where and where the kids kind of help each other out. So from that aspect, it really helped us,” he said.
