Baseball: Player of the year
De La Salle’s Blake Burke never got a chance to win a third and fourth North Coast Section championship because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But he was a driving force this spring behind the Spartans’ season-ending 13-game winning streak and 20-4 overall record.
The Tennessee-bound first baseman hit a mind-boggling .554 (41 for 74) with an even more astonishing .637 on-base percentage. He had six home runs and knocked in 32 runs.
Those numbers made Burke a clear choice for Bay Area News Group baseball player of the year.
READ MORE: All-Bay Area News Group teams – Spring 2021
- ⚾️ Baseball Fab 40 | Player of the Year | Coach
- 🥎 Softball Fab 40 | Player of the Year | Coach
- 🏀 Boys hoops Fab 25 | Player of the Year | Coach
- 🏀 Girls hoops Fab 25 | Player of the Year | Coach
Four seasons ago, he hit .345 as a freshman and had an RBI in the NCS Division I final against Foothill, an 11-0 DLS victory.
As a sophomore, he hit .395 and went 2 for 3 in the Spartans’ victory over Heritage for the NCS Division I title.
The pandemic wiped out nearly all of Burke’s junior season, and the NCS’s decision to not hold playoffs this spring prevented the 6-foot-3, 232-pound slugger from adding more sectional hardware to De La Salle’s trophy case.
In Burke’s four years on varsity, the Spartans went 78-10.
— Darren Sabedra
Softball: Player of the year
Jessica Oakland didn’t just get on base this spring while leading St. Francis to an undefeated season and Central Coast Section Open Division championship.
She made many trips around the bases.
The junior slugger and daughter of the team’s head coach, Mike Oakland, hit a Bay Area-leading 19 home runs as St. Francis went 26-0.
Oakland, a Minnesota commit, finished with 52 hits, 55 RBIs and a .642 on-base percentage.
She had at least one home run in each of the Lancers’ three CCS playoff games, including one in the final against Notre Dame-Salinas, a 6-0 victory for St. Francis.
Oakland had three multi-homer games and 19 multi-hit games, doing it for a school her father had led to championships in baseball and softball.
“Jess has grown up at St. Francis,” Mike Oakland told the Bay Area News Group after the softball team’s victory in the CCS final. “She has a tremendous amount of pride for this school and being a Lancer. For her, one of her goals was to win a CCS title — just one. Now, obviously, it’s going to be more than that.”
Oakland didn’t just achieve success this spring in softball. She also helped the school’s basketball team to a CCS final, winning a semifinal game on the same day as the section softball final.
— Darren Sabedra and Evan Webeck
