Titan resilience: How Skyline turned a six-game skid into a league championship run

OAKLAND - The season felt over before it ever really began.

Six games in, six losses - each defeat more lopsided than the previous one.

Skyline was staring into the abyss. Morale had cratered. Baseball suddenly didn't seem fun anymore.

The Titans could have fractured. Instead, they found each other.

What looked like an early epitaph has since become the origin story of one of the Bay Area's most surprising turnarounds.

After beating McClymonds 20-0 on Tuesday, Skyline (9-10, 5-0) remained undefeated in the Oakland Athletic League and is just two wins from a league championship. A remarkable pivot for a team that opened the year by dropping six straight, each by five runs or more.

The losses were by design, in a sense. Coach Marcel Johnson had deliberately loaded the non-league schedule, believing his Titans were ready to compete with some of the toughest programs in the region. They weren’t. But in the wreckage of that skid, something unexpected grew - a tighter team, one that started spending time together off the field and leaning on each other when the games got hard.

The results have been hard to argue with.

Since the losing streak ended, Skyline has knocked off Bishop O’Dowd, Salesian and Dougherty Valley and is now on the doorstep of a title that would feel familiar.

The Titans won three consecutive OAL championships from 2021 to 2023, and if Johnson’s group can find two more wins, they’ll be reminded of what it feels like to be on top of the league again.

"Morale was definitely a little low to start the season," Johnson said. "We had a transition period in the beginning and it was something that we had to change as a coaching staff and as players. We just grouped together, mutually talked and became closer. So we’re kind of more of a family now."

For the last few years, Skyline was in a rebuilding phase.

After the program won its last OAL title in 2023, Johnson took over from longtime coach James Salazar. In its first three seasons under Johnson, Skyline didn’t have a winning record but a talented senior class this spring gave the coach belief that the Titans could make some noise.

So Johnson scheduled tough.

Skyline's first six games were against Moreau Catholic, Newark Memorial, Piedmont, California, Tracy and University-San Francisco.

All ended in losses of five runs or more, which included a 10-0 loss to Moreau to open the season.

In hindsight, Johnson acknowledged, the bar may have been set a few notches too tall.

"Originally, my expectations were extremely high," Johnson said. "What I’ve found is that we were not as ready for those teams. It was something I was trying that was more of my vision, trying to get them to play these really, really tough teams."

Morale plummeted with each loss.

"It definitely stunk," senior captain Isaac Okajima said. "We knew we were much better than what we were playing."

But things started to turn around in Skyline's seventh game.

Matched up with Dougherty Valley of the East Bay Athletic League in March, Skyline was determined to not lose its season. The Titans played their cleanest game of the year and beat the San Ramon school 2-1 at home to earn its first win of the year.

"I think that’s just proved to us that we could play good defense, throw strikes and hit," Okajima said.

With just that one win, Skyline's confidence grew.

The Titans have gone on to win nine of their next 13 games, including victories over O'Dowd, Salesian and the OAL champion of the last two years, Oakland Tech.

Skyline attributes its newfound confidence to the shared sense of brotherhood that formed after the team's six-game skid.

"We had a lot of team bonding to help the morale," sophomore ace Errol Chinn said. "It really just connected us. We would play different sports like basketball, football and kickball just to get our minds right."

Skyline has a 1 1/2-game lead over Oakland Tech in the OAL standings. The Titans will need to win two of their last three league games to capture the OAL title. Skyline will be favored to do so as it will finish its series against McClymonds on Friday and will play a two-game series against last-place Castlemont next week.

For Johnson, the league title would be more than just a trophy. It would be validation - for a senior class that weathered the storm, for a program trying to reclaim its identity and for a tcoach still searching for his first winning season.

But even as Skyline stands on the doorstep of a championship, Johnson’s eyes are already drifting toward the bigger picture. The OAL title, meaningful as it would be, is only part of the vision. What he really wants to know is how far this group can go once the league schedule gives way to the postseason.

“We got a lot of seniors that are really stepping up. This is their last year. We’re a pretty old team and they’ve brought it together,” Johnson said. “It would mean a lot to win an OAL title with this group. But I will say, I’m looking to win the games outside the league. If we can play catch, we have enough to win and compete.”

Six losses deep, that kind of talk might have sounded like delusion. Now, coming from a team that has beaten some of the East Bay’s most well-known programs and turned a losing streak into a rallying point, it sounds a lot more like a warning.

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This story was originally published April 29, 2026 at 8:55 AM.