Centennial baseball coach Jon Williams feeds balls into a pitching machine during practice in Peoria on Feb. 20, 2025. (Photo by Dani Trujillo/Cronkite News)
PEORIA – Even old dogs can learn new tricks, or at least that’s what Centennial High School baseball coach Jon Williams believes.
The longtime baseball coach has ushered in a golden age of Coyotes baseball since taking the helm in 2020. The team’s talented senior class is poised for another 20-plus win season thanks to Williams’ tricks up his sleeve.
Williams has used sabermetrics technologies and a unique approach to year-round planning to turn Centennial into a powerhouse. The next step is to finally win a state championship.
“I’m a student of the game,” Williams said. “So as much as I am more old school, we like to bunt a lot and move runners and situational hitting and do all the little fundamental things right, which is super important. I’m also a student where I’m trying to learn every year.”
Centennial hasn’t been a baseball powerhouse historically. Before Williams’ tenure, the Coyotes bounced around from a few 20-plus win seasons to years of mediocrity as the team hadn’t won 20 games in a season since 2015.
That all changed when Centennial’s new skipper took over. Williams has orchestrated a renaissance for Coyotes baseball as he’s accumulated a 76-31 record and three consecutive 20-plus wins in each of the past three seasons.
“It really falls on the kids, but the plan was to work a little bit harder and kind of remove the entitlement,” Williams said. “There were a lot of entitlement issues in the program. Kids thought they deserved things without having to work for them.”
Williams has also developed a rigorous yearly plan to prepare for each season. It begins in August with a lifting program to muscle up before hitting the diamond. Then, the team starts baseball-related drills in the fall before increasing practice frequency to four times a week in February.
Last fall, the Coyotes played 82 offseason games to prepare for the upcoming season, just over half of a full MLB schedule. For reference, Centennial played just 86 games in its last three full seasons in games that count. The Coyotes have built a program committed to winning.
“As far as here in Arizona, I’ve been a part of a few programs, and they don’t have what I would consider a baseball program,” assistant coach Joe Escontrias said. “It’s all-encompassing, kind of the way it is here at the same time.”
Hard work has paid off as Williams has helped build players from the ground up. This year’s senior class is proof enough of their coach’s developmental mindset. So far, eight of the team’s 13 seniors are committed to colleges and there is still time for more to sign.
Senior third baseman and pitcher JT Price is committed to New Mexico State. The future Aggie’s story would have been a rare one at Centennial a few seasons ago as the Coyotes never had more than two commitments from 2022 to 2024.
Centennial senior JT Price stands on the mound at Centennial High School during practice in Peoria on Feb. 20, 2025. (Photo by Dani Trujillo/Cronkite News)
“Coach Williams is a great coach,” Price said. “He’s kind of been able to help get players here and develop guys throughout the four years.”
Williams frequently attends seminars, learns new techniques and studies baseball philosophies to get ahead and modernize his coaching. He’s also leaned into the analytical side of baseball after first hearing of a Rapsodo machine four years ago.
Rapsodo is a sports technology company selling devices outfitted with cameras to record data for golf, baseball and softball.
“I was at a baseball seminar and I ran into someone I knew there in the industry,” Williams said. “We started talking about Rapsodo and it just kind of fell in our lap a little bit. So it worked out.”
Centennial bought the first version of Rapsodo’s hitting and pitching machines and the company’s INSIGHT high-speed slow-motion cameras. Williams said the initial purchase cost the team $12,500 and was made possible by a Centennial booster club fundraiser. Even after spending so much money, the Coyotes still have to pay $1,500 yearly for data storage.
The team’s Rapsodo devices have it all. Once plugged in, the small device can provide instant video replay, 3D spray charts, pitch reenactments and beloved baseball metrics. Rapsodo allows Williams and the other coaches to see a pitcher’s spin rate and the exit velocity off a hitter’s bat.
“For hitting and pitching, with spin rates and all that stuff, we can work with the kids and get them better on where they need to be,” assistant coach Rich Homan said.
The team’s efforts seem to have paid off. In the 2021 season, Centennial hit .275 as a team and tallied 149 RBIs and 27 doubles. Since then, the Coyotes’ team batting average has never dipped below .333 for three consecutive seasons and they’ve recorded at least 185 RBI in each of the three seasons.
Last season was one of the best for Centennial’s lineup. Fourteen players hit above .300 and seven players recorded 20 or more hits in the Coyotes’ 29 games. The team even notched a .447 on-base percentage that helped generate an impressive 234 runs.
“When I hear ‘launch angle,’ I start to cringe and worry about guys hitting home runs,” Williams said. “But the more and more you dig into the analytics of it, we’re really, really looking at our launch angle compared to our exit velocity, and that’s helping create a big jump in our batting average you saw four years ago.”
The same trend can be seen with the Coyotes’ pitching staff. In 2021, the team had higher numbers of wild pitches, hit batters and balks. In the last three seasons, it appears closer coaching backed by sabermetrics has kept the team from ever recording more unfavorable statistics as Williams harps on small errors dragging the team down.
Centennial senior Isaac Flores, left, and junior Blake Baehr field ground balls during practice in Peoria on Feb. 20, 2025. (Photo by Dani Trujillo/Cronkite News)
“Williams is a very determined coach,” senior outfielder William Strand said. “He always pushes us to be better. We all don’t like losing, so we take it to heart when we lose, and we make sure that we fix the mistakes that we had in the game.”
While he’s got a lot on his plate, Williams also focuses on his opponents’ statistics and game plans. The Coyotes already know each opposing pitcher’s pitch repertoire and their velocity ranges before the first pitch. The team also knows a pitcher’s tendencies to find a weak spot to exploit.
It’s all possible with the team’s advanced scouting. A network of Williams and Centennial assistant coaches attends opposing teams’ games with radar guns to track speeds and pitch types. That extra effort gives Williams’ team a leg up and makes increasing the team’s batting average and other key statistics just a bit easier.
The team’s hopes are high heading into Thursday’s season opener at Shadow Ridge High School. Williams feels confident as he’s already planned out his pitching rotation thanks in part to his yearly team plan and analytics.
“I always talk about trying to lessen the excitement or not listen to the preseason predictions,” Williams said. “I’ve tried something different this year. This group has really been talking about some very lofty goals, and we’ve embraced it a little bit more.”
That preseason confidence appears to be the consensus around the dugout. The only sign of any doubt rests in the ever-important topic of injuries after losing Price and senior pitcher Cohen Baack to arm injuries last year.
Williams has done what he can to make injuries rarer with a mix of the team’s weights, agility and stretching programs backed by experienced trainers. The step to prevent injuries is another part of the Centennial coach’s vision for a baseball program, not just a team, that builds players up to committing to college ball.
“When a baseball player comes in and steps into their freshman year, they understand what their plan is and what their growth chart is going to be so that by the time they’re senior, they’re graduating out of here, they can become committed and move on to success,” Escontrias said.
The regular season will be more of the same rigorous work for the Coyotes as Williams seeks to deliver the program its first state title. Williams and his team believe they’re ready for what it takes.
“We’ve accepted that we’re going to be one of the teams to beat this year,” Williams said. “We’ve got it where it’s something that we have to embrace rather than just try to fly under the radar.”
