Warriors constantly hit above their weight

With all the national titles and resounding nature of Lewiston’s Avista NAIA World Series, some of the individual achievements for Lewis-Clark State’s storied baseball team have become foggy in the collective memory for many outside the program.

Remember when: On March 31, 1989, L-C tripped then-No. 1 Wichita State 4-2, handing the Shockers their third loss in 32 games up to that point. Wichita ended up as the NCAA Division I champion.

Perhaps not discussed as much as it should be is the Warriors’ fascinating history with the NCAA’s D-I ranks. Under celebrated former coach Ed Cheff, L-C had a winning record against Bobo Brayton’s Washington State Cougars. The Warriors defeated the likes of UNLV, Hawaii, Iowa, Texas Tech, Oregon State, Minnesota, Gonzaga, and Washington, to name a few. Top-caliber opponents like those were common on the schedule.

At times, LCSC’s foes were considered among the upper echelon in D-I, and bound for college baseball’s biggest stage, in Omaha, Neb., where the Warriors might’ve been headed if they were D-I.

Instead, these are footnotes in L-C’s history, recalled fondly by players, but oftentimes muddled in the archived schedules of their adversaries. In several instances, LCSC’s upset wins were chalked up to Lewis & Clark College of Portland.

“Back in the day, there wasn’t a concern with a lot of guys playing against small colleges,” said Cheff, who’d schedule fall tournaments in British Columbia every year, in which the Warriors would fine tune while squaring off against competition above their classification. “Bobo would play us anytime. I got to know a lot of coaches — at Washington, Oregon State. (OSU coach) Jack (Riley), he actually had hired me at Lower Columbia, so I knew him really well.

“It was fortunate that I knew coaches personally. Those friendships mean a lot. And we had some success against Division I schools.”

By the time the 1990s rolled around, the Warriors’ victories against teams at higher levels had become too frequent to ignore.

So L-C began to work out a move to the NCAA. According to Gary Picone, LCSC’s athletic director at the time, baseball would compete at the D-I level, and the other sports in Division II — a comparable pool of talent to that of the NAIA.

“Several NAIA programs (some of L-C’s traditional rivals) were transitioning to Division II,” Picone said. “It wasn’t crazy, it was kinda what some were thinking. And in that period of time, we played a lot of Division I opponents.”

It wasn’t only D-I, either. It just might have been Power Five.

At that time, the Pac-10 was split for baseball. It had a stalwart southern division, and the “NorPac,” which — along with Washington State and Oregon State — included programs that didn’t mesh with the conference elsewhere, like Gonzaga and Portland.

“It seemed like a natural fit to join,” remembered Jim Browitt, the Tribune’s LCSC beat writer then.

The divisions rarely played, except occasionally in conference tournaments that typically were catered toward the south.

At the decade’s midway point, the Pac-10’s northern division sought to add a team to help its case for a postseason not as controlled by the south, Picone recalled. According to a 1995 Spokesman-Review article, some administrators in the north saw the southern division as “elitist.” It didn’t let affiliate members have much of a say.

The Warriors, by virtue of their rapport, were in transition mode by 1996 as a provisional member, and a year later, LCSC’s schedule was “predominantly D-I,” said outfielder Bucky Jacobsen, a senior then. In fact, the Warriors played 30 games against D-I opponents that season.

“Because we had that temporary status, it was OK for D-I teams to play us; they weren’t giving up power points,” former L-C player/assistant coach Duane Church said. “In that transitional period, we were playing really good schools.”

But the departures of the Zags and Pilots to the West Coast Conference in 1995 — and Portland State’s plan to hop ship to the Big Sky — had made the north’s foundation tenuous.

“By 1998, the Pac-10 announced it would combine baseball seasons, so L-C had nowhere to go,” Browitt said.

Church remembers the Warriors briefly looking into other options, but independence started to appear like the only viable option. Financially, that’s tricky.

Either fortunately or unfortunately, LCSC’s flirtation with joining the NCAA concluded. It’d have been interesting to see what could have happened, but just months after it crumbled, the NAIA announced it had selected a certain school’s unique and financially promising bid to stage the Series.

Lewiston was set to be the event’s home again, beginning in 2000.

“It worked out for us and the NAIA in the end,” Church said.

Clark may be reached at cclark@lmtribune.com, on Twitter @ClarkTrib or by phone at (208) 627-3209.