March 11, 2026 | Isaac Garcia | Sports Editor
Baseball season is back in full swing, and the Wolves completed their first home series of the season this past weekend, going 2-2 against the Central Washington Wildcats. Going into the series, coach Walker, who’s now into his 21st season with the program and his 14th as head coach, explained that winning the “freebie war” would be a key to the Wolves’ success.
For those unfamiliar with what that might mean, coach Walker described it as “taking care of the baseball, not giving them free bases, whether it’s hit by pitch, walks or kicking balls behind our pitchers.” The team then traveled about an hour away to Newberg to take on George Fox Tuesday, March 10 and won 13-8.
So far this season, the Wolves have seen some strong performances from the pitching staff, with Ayden Holker and Shane Bailey both winning GNAC Pitcher of the Week honors at separate points of the season. Holker was awarded for his performance against Fresno Pacific in a 17-0 win to open the season, where he notched five strikeouts. As for Bailey, he received the honor after pitching seven strikeouts and only allowing one run against the Stan State Warriors Feb. 21 in a game that ended in a 5-1 victory for Western.
First-year pitcher Wyatt Rosales, out of Cypress High School in Buena Park, California, has hit the ground running to start his career and currently leads the team in ERA. “You know, we don’t see too many freshmen that are in our starting rotation over the course of the time that I’ve been here,” Walker said. “So just kind of the way that he handles his business, he’s pretty resilient, really good worker, open to feedback, willing to make changes, but overall just the word that I use with him for how old he is and you know, not a ton of experience at the four year collegiate level, he’s just really mature.”
As mentioned above, Kellen Walker has been leading the Wolves baseball program for 14 seasons after taking over in 2013 for Jeremiah Robbins, who won more than 250 games for the Wolves and is someone whom Walker credits as a mentor and significant influence over his coaching career. In that time, Walker has, of course, made improvements of his own, and he specifically points towards communication and patience as the main places he’s seen those improvements. For example, Walker emphasized understanding the different types of communication that work for different types of personalities and providing athletes with what he described as “a little bit more leash” to work through problems.
As for his coaching influences who’ve helped him grow as a leader in addition to Robbins, Walker also credits his father, who was a high school football coach and allowed him to be around the team from an early age. “I was around quite a few really good men early on in life,” said Walker. “And then I played for Glen Yonan at the junior college I was at, Lassen Community College. He really helped me mature and grow up, kind of gave me a good baseline for the game of baseball, how to go about your business. And then I played for Jay Johnson my first year at Point Loma, who’s the head coach at LSU now. So that was another really good one, he was only there for one year and then took the job at University of San Diego, being the recruiting guy there, and then kind of made a quick ascent to where he’s at now, obviously doing really well. And then Jeremiah Robbins would be the other biggest one. He’s probably my biggest mentor in the game. I played for him in the summers in high school and then he was the head coach when I came here. He gave me the opportunity to come here in 2006 and I just kind of kept finding reasons to stay because I like it here so much.”
Coach Walker also expressed excitement over some new members of the team. He says that the most recent group of additions has been excited to join the team and be in Monmouth and that they’ve bought into the program’s culture pretty quickly.
There’s also a solid group of upperclassmen prepared to lead. “They’ve done a great job of just kind of helping, like, ‘Hey, this is how we do it or, like, we don’t do that here,’ kind of early in the fall that kind of I think helped get people on board earlier. And at this point that’s I think the biggest thing that we have going is the buy-in from the roster. So even though there’s been a little bit of turbulence in this challenging early season schedule that we put together, I think because of guys like Shane Bailey, (Ayden) Holker, Collin Irwin, Tyler Mohler, some of those older guys that have been through it, that have played in those big games in May and you know, done some cool stuff here. They really help kind of jumpstart and expedite that process of getting guys bought in early so that we are able to hopefully weather this storm and get this thing going in the right direction.”
The Wolves’ next series is at Montana State University Billings, starting on Friday, and will include four games in 48 hours for the Wolves. They then travel to Seaside, California March 20 for a series against California State University Monterey Bay for a series of four games in three days. When asked what improvements he hopes to see from the team throughout the remainder of the year, Walker mentioned the team having the capability to put together strong performances for full weekends and enduring high volumes of games in short periods of time as “absolutely the key to winning series, because we’ve shown signs of being a really, really good team and then we’ve shown signs of being pretty average. And so our ability to do all those little things to stay present and to be competitive for the duration of a four game series, even if it’s in under 48 hours, will ultimately be the key to how much success we have.”
If there’s one thing coach Walker would like fans to know about the team going into and leaving a game, he said, “One of my goals for a team every year is when someone comes and watches us, I want at least one person in the stands to leave saying ‘That’s the hardest I’ve ever seen the team play,’ whether it went good or bad.”
The Wolves next return home March 28 for another series of four games in 48 hours against Saint Martin’s University at the WOU Baseball Field, with the first game starting at 1 p.m. on both the first and second day of the series.
Contact the author at howlsports@mail.wou.edu
