Napa Valley High School Softball: Harris leaving American Canyon helm after 14 seasons

An off-campus coach, his younger daughter, Lacey, was a senior on the team that year and graduating, so there would no longer be the incentive to coach family.

Secondly, being in only his second year as a high school coach, Harris had made a scheduling blunder that would have made a lot of coaches not only want to resign but to hide.

But Harris stayed on another 11 years, helping build a winning culture and keeping the sport fun. One reason he stayed on was the connection his family still had to ACHS; his wife of 38 years, fellow Vintage High graduate Marcie Harris, has been an Assistant Principal Secretary at American Canyon since the school opened.

But Roger Harris, 63, finally decided to call it a coaching career last month after the Wolves went 1-1 in the playoffs after finishing third in the VVAL at 9-3 and 17-7 overall.

“It’s bittersweet, but I think it’s the right time,” he said. “I have five grandkids and I’m like two years away from retiring from my real job and I just think it’s time for my next chapter.

After beating Northgate 5-2 in their NCS Division 2 playoff opener on May 14, the Wolves fell 10-0 at Benicia on May 17 without any of their seven seniors.

“We told the seniors after our first playoff game against Northgate because they were going on their grad trip to Disneyland,” Harris said. “When we went into the game against Benicia in the quarterfinals, we only had nine players. After we lost to them, we told the rest of the team that Friday.

“All seven seniors were gone. It happens every year. That’s one of the first couple of questions we ask before each season: when’s prom, when’s grad night, and when’s senior ditch day? Because we’ve been fortunate enough to be in the playoffs a lot. It happened to us two years also, when we played Benicia in the semifinals we were down some people, and it happened last year when we played Casa Grande in the quarterfinals we were down some people because of grad night.”

Harris said he enjoyed developing players and working over the years with assistant coaches who included Dan Feinberg, Whitney Foran, Steve “Butch” Ercole Jr. and Kelsee Romero.

“There was always the next season, with a new group of girls coming in,” Harris said. “Once you get past that grind feeling, it usually takes three or four weeks once the season’s over (to unwind). My wife and I love to camp and we haven’t the house trailer out since last July, so we’ll be able to do more camping and stuff like that now.

“I played a lot of golf and when I got into coaching, that went by the wayside. Last time I played was on one of the state holidays before this season. I’m going to have to get in shape because after playing 18 holes with my son I was really sore for like a week and a half.”

His 2013 team, to earn the program’s first-ever postseason berth, thought it had to only beat Vallejo a third time in their Solano County Athletic Conference and regular-season finale to qualify for the Sac-Joaquin Section playoffs.

However, Harris was informed by then-Athletic Director Jill Stewart that the Wolves had gone over the 27 regular-season contacts allowed by the section and were not eligible for postseason play. Harris thought he had read in the section rulebook that the five games American Canyon played at the Napa High tournament would count as two games.

“I had read the bylaws about volleyball, not softball,” he recalled. “Making my own schedule was one of the things about being a new program and a new coach at the high school level that I had to learn on the fly, and that was a really hard lesson to learn.

“I even went to the point where I told Jill, ‘Suspend me — Butch (then-assistant coach Steve Ercole) can take the team — but don’t penalize the girls if I messed up.’ The section wouldn’t look at it that way. All they knew was what the rule said. I had to tell the whole team that I had made a mistake.”

It must have been heartbreaking for his daughter and the other three seniors, especially.

Regardless, the team showed up the next day and blanked Vallejo 9-0 to finish 13-17 overall and 8-7 in the SCAC. They had gone 2-16-1 and 0-9 in their first varsity season the year before.

“I was really surprised when everybody showed up the next day. I expected that they were all going to be mad, and I wouldn’t have blamed them,” he recalled. “Give them props. They showed up and played the last game. But that was a tough one.”

The fact that the team was understanding enough, and passionate about the game, to play for the lesser goal of its first-ever winning record in league play, told Harris he was every bit needed at the helm as before.

The Wolves not only made the playoffs the following season, by finishing third in the conference and with only 23 regular-season contacts, but also posted their first playoff victory. American Canyon and visiting Rosemont each scored six runs in the seventh inning of that wild 9-8 victory.

The Wolves also finished third in the SCAC — behind Benicia and Vanden — and made the SJS playoffs in 2015, 2017 and 2018 and were fourth in 2016. They were 82-88-1 overall and 51-48 during those first seven seasons.

In the new Vine Valley Athletic League in 2019, American Canyon finished in a three-way tie for second place behind Napa High and made the North Coast Section playoffs.

The Wolves finally finished first in league play in 2021, but didn’t get a pennant to hang in the gym. Because all sports during that school year were played in the spring, leaving some teams without key athletes, the VVAL said participation would be the focus and no win-loss records would be kept. All postseason play was also canceled.

The Wolves were 78-38 overall and 45-15 as VVAL members under Harris. For his entire tenure, they were 160-126-1 overall and 96-63-1 in league games, and were 5-9 in the section playoffs, including 3-3 in the NCS.

Harris said Kristen Grubbs, the Napa High graduate whose Benicia program never lost to American Canyon while they were both in the SCAC nor since, congratulated him after this year’s playoff loss. The Wolves nearly downed the Panthers when they made their deepest playoff run in 2022 and lost 6-5 to Benicia in the NCS Division 2 semifinals.

“She gave us some pretty good props,” Harris said of Grubbs. “I had told her before the start of the game and then at the end of the game when the teams were going through the line. She told me the program wouldn’t be where it is if I wasn’t there, that we built a good foundation.”

Harris got his start in coaching with American Canyon Little League baseball.

“I coached my older daughter (Kayla) in tee ball and when my son (Kolton) was old enough for Little League I coached him all the way up to Major Division when he was 12,” he said. “My older daughter was there in the first year of ACLL softball and I was one of their first coaches in 2004. When my son jumped to Junior league, I started coaching my younger daughter, Lacey. My older daughter and I started coaching together and we did that until 2009. I was hired by the school in 2010 and I started coaching Kiwanis that summer. I coached a couple of years at Kiwanis, took a year off coaching and just umpired there one year, and then our first season was a JV one in 2011.”

Harris also coached the AC Elite travel softball team for two years. It existed from 2012-2016.

“It was just to get the girls more experience,” he explained. “When we had our first team in JV, we had like four or five girls who played softball. The rest wanted to play softball. That year I kept 20 girls. Every girl that tried out, we kept them. We didn’t make any cuts. We’ve made cuts since, but we also expanded our roster.”

That 2011 JV team won two games all season. Harris was learning to coach high school softball as he went, and tried to learn as much as he could from then-Napa High head coach John O’Connor and then-Vintage head coach Ward Mullins, who had coached Lacey one summer.

“One thing that stood out with John was he was very even-tempered. He wasn’t a yeller or anything like that,” Harris said. “That was one of the things I learned in the beginning, that you’re not going to get any response, or get anything better out of your players if you yell and scream at them. That’s kind of the style that I went with. I didn’t yell, I didn’t scream. When kids make errors, they feel bad enough. You just have a conversation with them and talk about what happened and what they can do differently.

“When you’re the head of the program, it’s so much more than just coaching inside the lines. You’re doing work orders, maintaining your field, ordering uniforms, having a budget, all that stuff.”

The Wolves’ team GPA this year was 3.2.

“We had seven Scholar-Athletes on varsity and two on JV, meaning those with a GPA of 3.5 or higher, and we had three girls that were at 4.0 or above,” he said. “Academics was really huge for us because we’re helping mold them a little bit into the young adults they’ll be once they get out of school.

“As we told them, it’s about so much more than playing a game. It’s being teammate, being able to get along with your teammates, being able to talk to your coaches — which helps you to be able to talk to your teachers in the classroom — and learning about accountability and time management. You can teach all that while you’re also coaching a sport.”

Along with coaching softball at American Canyon, Harris has run the game clock for football and girls basketball games.

“My wife says I need to keep doing football because she gets good seats,” he said. “I’ll probably still be there for football.”

Harris will miss coaching adjacent to Matt Brown, who has been head coach of American Canyon High baseball since the school opened.

“Matt and I would converse back and forth every day or every other day,” he said. “We’d meet between the fields when he was doing his and I was doing mine. Matt is doing it the right way also. He’s got a great foundation and good assistant coaches. I’ve really admired Matt for the way he does his thing out there.”

Harris figures he’ll feel the change when he’s not overseeing the conditioning the Wolves start doing just after Thanksgiving each year, workouts that had started even earlier prior to the pandemic.

“It’s going to be different,” he said. “I drive by the school every day I go to work in Fairfield and now when I come home, I will not have to turn my blinker on to pull into the back of the school to go to the field.

"But I’m going to miss the interaction with the players and coaches. I think we laid a foundation there and what helps is the talent that’s coming up. They’re starting so young now, playing travel ball. I saw a pitcher at the Little League park last year who was 10 years old and was throwing probably in the high 30s (mph) or low 40s. Mine throw in the high 50s or low 60s.

“I have been very fortunate to have the longevity that I’ve had. I’ve had a great support system, from my coaches to teachers on campus to the ADs to my wife. Hopefully we’ve built a good foundation going forward. The new coach, whoever it is, is going to want to do their own thing. But I think the standard is set and whoever comes in is going to still strive to be competitive and make the playoffs.”