Kiser to depend on area players as new PC baseball coach

Jake Kiser hasn’t had much time to prepare for the 2011 Porterville College baseball team, so he’s hit the ground running. And his goal is to keep as many local players here to form a base for a competitive team in the tough Central Valley Conference.

Kiser was hired as PC’s new baseball coach less than two months ago, so he obviously got a late start as far as recruiting for the 2011 season. “We jumped on the recruiting trail hard right from the get go,” Kiser said. “We felt that we were able to keep most of the local kids from Porterville here in Porterville. We kept most of them here.

“That’s been pretty much what we’ve been doing all summer just trying to find kids.”

Kiser said he’ll have a roster of about 30 to 35 players when fall practice begins on Thursday. PC will play up to 10 fall games, beginning on Saturday, Sept. 25. Kiser only has a few players back from last year’s team in a program that’s been struggling, so it figures that the 2011 team will go through growing pains.

“We’re going to be real young obviously,” Kiser said. “The majority of our team will obviously be freshmen. We’re not going to have much depth. We need to keep the kids healthy. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

So right now the goals are simple. “Really at this point our only goals are to improve,” Kiser said. “We need to get the kids in our area to stay in our area. That’s a big goal.”

And Kiser said he believes the area has enough players to form the base for a competitive program. “I think there’s enough in the local area to get a nice base,” Kiser said.

Kiser did say that another goal is to have the community involved in his program as much as possible.

But Kiser also said he plans on recruiting the Visalia, Fresno and Bakersfield areas and believes that will complete the formula for a competitive program. “We think we can be competitive,” Kiser said.

It will obviously be tough to be competitive in the Cental Valley Conference which features state powers Fresno City and Merced. Kiser said he believes the CVC is Northern California’s second toughest conference.

And Kiser should know about how competitive the CVC is, spending his last four seasons as the top assistant coach at College of Sequoias. Among his most important duties at COS was recruiting.

His reason for coming to PC was simple. “I want to be a head coach,” Kiser said.

Kiser is a 1997 Paso Robles High graduate who attended Santa Maria’s Alan Hancock and went on to play at Clarke College, which was a Division III school in Iowa when he was there. He went on to be an assistant coach at Paso Robles before taking over as Golden West’s head coach in 2005 and 2006.

Golden West won the West Yosemite League championship both seasons. In 2006, Golden West lost in the Valley semifinals in extra innings to eventual Valley champion Buchanan.