When Cooper Stone first mentioned the idea, his teammates thought he was nuts.
It didn’t stop him from suggesting it again. Now his Willis baseball teammates have bleached tops to show for it.
After Willis beat Conroe in the final game of the regular season to clinch a playoff berth of District 13-6A, the Wildkats all gathered at one of the player’s house to bleach their hair blonde.
“It’s been a thing since the middle of the season,” Stone explained. “We started 0-6, and one day I brought it up, and everybody kind thought I was crazy. We weren’t playing good baseball at all, and we get to that Conroe week, and I say, ‘Hey, do you all want blonde hair or not?’ Everybody kind of looked at me, and we were ready to go. So after that Friday night game when we beat Conroe, we all went over to our friend’s house, and we all dyed our hair blonde.”
Now they’re sporting the blonde tops for the playoffs, which continues in this week’s Region II-6A area series against Tomball. Game 1 is set for 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Willis. Game 2 shifts to Tomball at 4 p.m. Friday, with an if-necessary game to follow that night.
Willis (12-14) is coming off its first playoff win in six years after beating Aldine MacArthur in a one-game bi-district. Tomball (22-9) won its best-of-3 series with Bridgeland to advance.
Call these Wildkats playoff poised with some bleach to top it off.
“It was a playoff thing,” Willis senior catcher Marshall Niederhofer said. “Even in the fall when we first got together, we all said, ‘If we make playoffs, we’re all going blonde.’ So right before we made playoffs, we said, ‘If we win this game Friday, we’re going to someone’s house and bleaching our hair.’ After we won it, and clinched playoffs, we all went to a house, and we all bleached our hair together.”
Coach Casey Buaas was hit by surprise of his team’s decision to go blonde.
“I have no idea to be honest with you,” Buaas said. “I guess after we won the Conroe game that Friday night, you know, the guys got together and went over to one of the players’ houses. They’re big into Forty-Two (dominoes). All they want to do is play Forty-Two. Then I get a few pictures of blonde hair, and a few more and a few more, and it just kept on rolling in. They were orange that night, so they had to go get ’em fixed.”
Initially, Wildkat moms weren’t too crazy about the idea.
“My mom, she was like, ‘Cooper, don’t do it. Don’t do it,’” Stone said. “But I was like, ‘Mom, it’s a team thing.’ She was OK with it. Last Monday, I went into my teachers’ classes, and they didn’t really recognize me. They all just said, ‘Is this a prank?’ or ‘What’s this?’ or ‘What’s that?’ So it’s been pretty funny.”
Apparently, the Wildkats’ coaching staff is on board with it now.
“Coaches keep telling us to do mohawks, go light or do our beards, get mullets,” Niederhofer said. “So we don’t know what we have in store just yet.”
Incoming Willis principal Chad Smith practically needed sunglasses when he was introduced to all the light tops traipsing around school.
“We got a new principal, and I think he came in last Friday, and he came in here and he said, ‘Why does everyone have blonde hair?’” Stone said. “I met him for the first time, and he said, ‘You must be a baseball boy because you’ve got that bleach blonde hair.’”
Who knows, they might just have to get used to it around Willis.
“Hopefully it’s a trend,” Niederhofer said. “All the seniors, there’s 12 of us, so all the seniors besides maybe one did it. So we hope that they continue to do it for years to come.”
Jim McCurdy is a freelance sports reporter.
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