After coming off a 6-14 season last year and entering this season with an entirely new varsity coaching staff, many players on the baseball team felt uncertain about the season to come. After conferring with the rest of the coaching staff, first-year coach Colin Portugal (he/him) approached the team with an attitude he believed would bring out their best.
“Our biggest thing was to come out here and just try and get them with good vibes, get the energy high,” Portugal said. “Tell them, this is fun that we get to be out here. Not many people get to be out here. There’s a select few that get to be out here practicing on the varsity level every day.”
Portugal graduated from Inglemoor in 2014 and will be the boys varsity basketball head coach in the winter as well. During this year’s basketball season, Athletic Director Kealey Stanich approached him about baseball’s coaching vacancy, unaware that Portugal had collegiate baseball experience at Shoreline Community College and Central Washington University.
The team finished the 2025 regular season with 14 wins and 6 losses, inverting last year’s record. Senior Connor Dowell (he/him) and junior Dylan Clark (he/him) agree that the team’s success was likely due to a mixture of factors, including the new coaching staff and the move to 3A.
The team lost in the quarterfinals of the state tournament to finish top eight in Washington. A highlight of their season occurred on May 14 with an extra inning walk-off victory to claim the KingCo Championship title for the first time since 2018, a moment Clark and Dowell will cherish.
“We had a lot of opportunities to walk it off and it took a couple innings to do it, but, you know, we ended up getting the job done,” Clark said. “Really, shout out to our pitchers. Our pitchers kept us in that game; they were battling the whole entire time.”
Sophomore Brody Ledger pitched for an impressive eight innings in that game, followed by seniors Henry Kresken and Cooper Richter. As another senior on the team, Dowell felt that the team’s success this year goes beyond just numbers.
“It feels so good knowing that in future years, people will see that banner and know what we did this season, like the run that we went on,” Dowell said. “It feels good to leave a mark on my last year playing baseball.”
Dowell and his fellow seniors’ last year coincided with the first year of a new era for the team. Portugal and his fresh varsity coaching staff have set a precedent for success after their KingCo Championship win that the team hopes to defend. As a junior, Clark has high hopes for their continued success after this season.
“I’m hoping we build off this season next year,” Clark said. “Something I said to the boys after our last win (in the KingCo Championship) is that this is the start of a dynasty.”
The players on the field were not the only contributors to the championship win. Dowell expressed confidence in and gratitude for next year’s class of seniors, especially those who worked with the varsity team this season. “The guys that got pulled up from JV, they might think that they don’t have that big of an impact, but they really do,” Dowell said. “Cheering on and keeping the energy in the dugout — it really helps. I think that’s a huge reason why we won that long game.”
Portugal feels confident in the work he and his team have done day in and day out through the season, and how this work has laid the foundation for a strong program in the future. In order to illustrate his point, Portugal referenced an admittedly cheesy quote from the 1989 baseball movie “Field of Dreams.”
“‘If you build it, they will come,’” Portugal said. “At this point, I knew this program was at a down, and our objective was to try and rebuild it. After one year, which is a little fast-tracked compared to what I had mentally prepared for myself, I think we’ve built it.”
