When Jason Willis put in his resume with the head baseball coach position at Stratford opened up, he just put it in “on a whim.”

Turns out the whim was good enough for him to land the job.

Willis, who was the head coach at Klein Forest for the last three years, now comes cross-town to help the Spartan program climb back into one of elite teams in the Houston area.

“It’s going to be a great experience,” Willis said. “I always wanted a team with the tradition Stratford has. I like what I see in the kids, they are getting out here and working hard, and are playing the game the right way.”

Willis takes over a team that went 17-10 overall, but Stratford struggled to an 8-6 finish in District 19-5A and did not qualify for the playoffs.

While watching his new team battle against Westside in a summer-league game (Westside won 10-5 in six innings), Willis feels that there is enough talent on this team to get the Spartans back on track.

“The kids here have the basic skills down, they just need to know the ins-and-outs of playing the game,” Willis said. “The little things like situational hitting and situational pitching. This program can return to prominence like it did the last two years. There’s definitely the kids to do it here.”

After stints at a 1A school in Collinsville and a 2A school in south Texas, Willis came to the Houston area at Friendswood Junior High as an assistant football/baseball coach, then was promoted to be an assistant at Friendswood High. He held that position for for five years, then took the head baseball job at Klein Forest and stayed there for the next five.

In 2008, the Eagles went 3-16 overall and 1-11 in a very tough District 16-5A after posting double-digit wins the previous two seasons.

Willis has already set his goal for 2009, and that is to get Stratford back into the postseason. With powers like Memorial and Strake Jesuit and improving teams like Elsik and Spring Woods in the district, Willis is confident that the Spartans have the talent to get there.

“The first goal, and that’s for everyone that’s a Spartan, is to get back into the playoffs,” he said. “After missing it last year, there’s a lot of hard feelings on some of these kids here. So the first step is to get into the playoffs and going a few rounds deep. These guys have the talent to do it.”

Subscribe to this comment's feed