Sports

The June 18 game was as dramatic as it was unexpected for the home team. The previous night, in the teams’ first meeting this year, Healdsburg built a seemingly insurmountable lead of 11-3 at the end of only five innings, and it looked like another one of those Packer blowouts...

To look at the scoreboard of many recent Healdsburg Prune Packers games, one might think that’s softball being played on the field. On June 14, the Stockton Pearls fell 20-1, and the Bay Area Marauders went down 24-5 on June 15. These are scores more frequently found on diamonds where the bases are 60 feet apart, not 90. In softball, at least at the high school level, the “mercy rule” ends a game early if there’s a 10-point spread. No such rule affects collegiate baseball. 

For the seventh time in eight years, young wrestlers traveled to Healdsburg last week to sharpen skills, compare notes and share their enthusiasm for the sport in the Drew Esquivel Memorial Wrestling Camp, held June 12-14 on the Healdsburg High campus.

It took the Healdsburg Prune Packers less than two innings to start sending balls over the Rec Park fence. Center fielder Jonathan Kim of the University of Michigan slammed a high fly over the right field fence with two runners on, and from that point on the power-hitting Prune Packers have made hitting homers part of their game plan.

For the second year in a row, a Greyhound won the Most Valuable Pitcher award as Eric Nielsen followed 2024's co-winner Mauro-Manos into the exclusive circle. Nielsen’s finishing record of 10 wins and 83 strikeouts led in the league and placed him among the top 10 high school pitchers statewide.

For the first time in Mark Domenichelli’s 16 years as a baseball coach at Healdsburg High, his team has reached the semifinals in the division championship series. That means they’re just one win away from the finals, two from the title.

“Scholarship Night is truly a testament to the generosity of the community of Healdsburg and how much our town cares about our young people,” said Shelley Anderson, the school’s scholarship coordinator. “Because of our robust and bountiful scholarship program and donors, many of our HHS graduates are able to get their four-year degrees with minimal or no debt.”

With this season’s NBL play now passed, both the boys baseball and girls softball teams look forward to the North Coast Section tournament of the top 16 teams in each division. The girls play in Division 5, the boys in Division 4.

The Healdsburg varsity has won nine of their last 11 games and is on a four-game winning streak. This week, they end the Redwood schedule with a pair of games against Piner, whose 4-9 record places them fifth in the six-team league.

Swimmers from Healdsburg and Windsor high schools, neighboring campuses with a long shared history and intertwined roots, have been nipping at each other’s heels all season. For one, they share the same pool at Healdsburg High—so they stagger their daily practices, schedule their meets around each other and rub shoulders in the locker room...