Monday, May 16, 2005 | 9:27 a.m.
Community College of Southern Nevada baseball coach Tim Chambers could not gloss over a bitter ending to the Coyotes' season Sunday.
"It's not a good story," Chambers said. "You can't have a (regular) season like that and then lay down like we did in the playoffs. It's a failure. We had high aspirations for this team ... it's a big, big disappointment."
After winning the Scenic West Athletic Conference regular-season title, CCSN advanced through the first week of the Region 18 tournament to play Dixie State for the regional championship.
And the Coyotes played that best-of-three series at home, at Morse Stadium, no less.
Yet the home-field advantage meant little in 4-2 and 2-1 defeats, the latter in 13 innings, to the Rebels (41-14) on Thursday and Friday. A third game would have been played at Morse on Saturday afternoon.
"At worst, we have to get to Saturday. We don't even do that," said Chambers, a former Bishop Gorman High coach who started CCSN's program six years ago.
The Coyotes finished the season 46-14.
"To outsiders, to people who don't understand the game and how things go, it's the old 'choke' word," Chambers said. "I've lost a lot of seasons at the end, and people thought we choked. We didn't. We got beat by the better team,
"This time, I think we choked a little bit."
Thursday night, CCSN had loaded the bases with one out and trailing by two runs in the bottom of the ninth inning before fizzling.
Friday, the Coyotes had 10 runners on bases between the seventh and 10th innings, but they didn't produce one run out of those situations.
"When you get in big games, your sophomores have to step up," Chambers said. "If they don't, you won't be successful."
Chambers said neither Ryan Tabor, Thursday's starter, nor Jesse Craig, who started Friday's game, deserved not to win their outings.
Both played their final games for CCSN over the weekend.
Chambers said he expects Jorge "Pudge" Esquivel, out of Cimarron-Memorial High, to be a cornerstone of next season's team. Esquivel had four hits against Dixie on Friday.
In addition, Chambers expects a big sophomore season out of Andy Primas, a former Centennial High standout who played a stellar second base Friday.
After getting away from the game for the next few days, Chambers said he will determine who he wants to bring back for 2006, figure out where the holes will be, cull his recruiting grapevine and outline his fall-ball regimen.
"It never stops," he said. "There isn't a lot of time to sit and cry about it."
In just the fourth year of the program, CCSN won the national championship in 2003. Dixie won it last year, and Chambers gave Rebels coach Mike Littlewood some words of encouragement when the dust settled late Friday night.
Dixie moves on to the Western District championship, where the victor advances to the NJCAA World Series in Colorado at the end of the month.
"I told him, 'Go win it all,' " Chambers said. "They did a great job. You can't take everything away from us, but give those guys credit. They came in and competed. They got it done. It's not like we lost to someone who couldn't beat us.
"They're a helluva team."
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