Photo courtesy of Todd Kwarcinski
Briarwood Baseball
Playoff memories burn strong for Jake Morris, as he hopes to get deep into the postseason in his senior campaign. Briarwood Christian will need Morris’ offensive contributions to make a playoff push.
Jake Morris remembers the play well.
“It was going over,” he said.
Morris was the starting centerfielder for Briarwood Christian School as a sophomore in 2014, and saw the most pivotal moment of his young varsity baseball career unfolding in the Class 5A state playoff quarterfinals.
The Lions were facing a strong Southside-Gadsden team in the series. In the fourth inning of the first game, Southside’s Brock Love scorched a ball to straightaway center.
“Honestly, I had no idea where the fence was,” Morris recalls, now in his senior season and one of the leaders for Briarwood. “It was a shot. I turned around and ran as fast I could.”
Morris needed the help of a teammate, though. In a dead sprint, there was no time to take his eyes off the ball.
“Brayden Housel was in right field at the time. He’s the one who started screaming, ‘Fence! Fence! Fence!’ I just jumped and felt the fence…hit the fence, grabbed (the ball) and pulled it back in,” he said.
“It was a great moment.”
His head coach, Steve Renfroe, recounts the moment the same way, and added, “It’s one of those moments a kid will remember, and it was at a big time.”
“We saw it happen, and that’s the moment we realized how big of a moment it was for this team,” teammate and fellow senior Luis Fuentes said. “It was insane when it happened.”
The win propelled Briarwood to a sweep of Southside and a berth in the semifinals.
Last season, the Lions moved up to Class 6A. Briarwood advanced to the quarterfinals once again and won the first game of its series against Pinson Valley, but faltered in the final two games of the series and saw its season end, a moment Morris has not forgotten.
“I’ve been a little bitter about that throughout the offseason and throughout football. I don’t know how we lost that. That’s given me more motivation to work harder in the offseason,” he said.
Getting to that series with Pinson was no small feat, as Briarwood defeated Homewood in a deciding Game 3. The Lions twice rallied from behind, being down four runs early and allowing two runs in the top of the ninth inning. Briarwood scored three in the bottom half to walk off the winner.
“I remember going to Baumhower’s after the game and we were sitting there,” Fuentes said of the team’s public outing after the win. “We saw the TVs. We saw us winning the game and everybody rushing the field, and we just went crazy and started screaming. People started staring at us, but we didn’t care.”
The 2016 version of the Lions contains just four seniors in Morris, Fuentes, Trey Mitchell and Carter Bankston — who signed to play football at the United States Naval Academy. Fuentes credits the whole team as having a “strong bond,” even outside the senior class.
“All glory to God for giving us this great group of guys,” Morris said. “We love each other. We always joke around and have fun together.”
Briarwood has the benefit of experience at the highest levels on its coaching staff. Renfroe coached at Auburn University for over 20 years, while assistant coaches Wes Helms and Matt Guerrier each had long Major League careers.
“Coach Renfroe keeps telling us we have great knowledge here,” Morris said. “We have the best coaching staff in Alabama and one of the best in America.”
Morris doesn’t voluntarily offer up attributes and skills that make him stand out from other baseball players, but there is one thing he can’t escape from: his fiery-red hair.
“Flamo” and “Ginga-Ninja” are some of the nicknames the mane has gotten him. The Briarwood student section down the first base line always exclaims, “flame on” when Morris comes up to bat, which always gives him a smile.
The only problem is that he’s now starting to “flow it out,” and he lives in fear that he will be asked to cut it. One of his coaches forced him to do so during football season, but he hasn’t been required to do so in baseball.
He’s flirting with disaster, though.
“He told me during football season to get it cut, and I had to cut it. But I was standing next to him and someone came up to him with long hair, and my hair was longer than his. He told him to get a haircut, but he hasn’t told me to get it cut yet,” Morris said.
But after the last two seasons ended too soon for his liking, the hair will be the least of Morris’ worries come playoff time.
