Senior Spotlight: Willey left lessons of hard work at Perkiomen Valley

There was a good chance the 2020 season was going to be the last of Brian Willey’s baseball career.

Like his other three seasons in the program, the Perkiomen Valley senior baseball player made sure he did everything in his power in the offseason to put him and his team in the best position to succeed.

That included dedicating numerous hours in the weight room and the Vikings’ Driveline throwing program to prep for his final year.

“I think it really just comes from my dad (Ken),” Willey said of his work ethic. “From the start, with any sport, he’s just tried to instill giving it your all, showing up to any workout whether it’s optional or not. Just going to everything and putting in your all to so you can get better to help better yourself and also the team.”

Though there will be no senior season for Willey — the COVID-19 pandemic wiping it away — his efforts won’t be wasted before he heads to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst to study sports management.

He will be one of the examples PV coach Ryan Hinkle uses to teach others who follow him in the program.

“Those are the guys that we try to tell the other guys, ‘Look at his work ethic. Look at his growth within the program,’” Hinkle said. “Guys like him, the guys who just want to get to work, the guys who don’t want to deal or listen to all the noise that can come from the stands or over arguments with playing time within your teammates, those are the guys you want to have within your program. Brian is a guy I’ll use as an example for other kids — and that’s kind of this whole senior class.”

Willey first took the mound for the PV varsity squad as a junior in 2019 for a start against Pottsgrove in which he pitched five shutout innings and struck out eight batters. One of the other highlights of Willey’s junior season was tossing six innings of shutout relief in a come-from behind-win over Upper Perkiomen.

He was one of three seniors along with Gabe Mallo and Tony DeLawrence, who will respectively play at Millersville University and the University of South Carolina Upstate, slated to head the Vikings’ efforts on the mound this season after the departure of four-year starter Tyler Strechay, now pitching at West Virginia University.

“Pitching staff-wise this year, we were fairly confident of what we would bring to the table,” Hinkle said. ‘We had a good combination of three starters (Willey, Mallo, DeLawrence). We had a lot of good juniors who were going to compete. We were hoping that those three would pan out, and Brian really came on strong last year.”

Without Strechay in the mix, the Vikings were looking for someone new to take the ball in big games as they tried to get back into the Pioneer Athletic Conference playoffs after a one-year hiatus and advance deep into the District 1 tournament following a first-round exit in 2019.

Getting the opportunity to pitch against PV’s Liberty Division rivals as one of the team’s top rotation pieces and potentially step on the mound to start a league or district playoff game are the opportunities Willey unfortunately missed out on without a senior season.

“Throughout Driveline and then lifting in the offseason, which I did pretty heavy, I was looking forward to throwing harder, to get more accurate and then pitch those big games against the Boyertowns, the Spring-Fords, Methacton and lead our team through that way,” Willey said. “It really would have been a turning point and we would have really stepped up to pitch those big games.”

Willey’s never been a flamethrower on the mound. The lanky lefthander, who also saw limited action in the field and at the plate in 2019, instead relies on his accuracy, a changeup described as “filthy” by Hinkle and a curveball to keep hitters off balance.

The senior has put in lots of effort to improve his velocity over his four years at Perkiomen Valley. Hinkle noticed his presence at nearly every throwing session this offseason and noted that it paid off as well as Willey had the biggest increase in velocity of any PV player in the data-driven Driveline throwing program.

“I know how hard he worked toward his senior year and the stamp that he wanted to leave because he knows after this he doesn’t know what’s going to happen,” Hinkle said.

Those offseason efforts have also been noticed by his peers in the program during his time at Perkiomen Valley and even before.

“As a pitcher and a player, he worked extremely hard,” said PV senior catcher Brendan Shayer, who has played with Willey since they were 8 years old. “He was in the weight room getting bigger and stronger. He got a lot stronger from his freshman to senior season. I think he was ready to have a really big season this year.”

When he wasn’t in the weight room, throwing, hitting or helping his dad fix up the Vikings’ field, Willey filled up his time playing tenor saxophone in the concert band.

Though Willey said the two passions didn’t often conflict, he had to miss the PV Senior Night in 2019 for the band’s spring concert. It was a dilemma he was hoping not to be saddled with this season.

“It’s really rewarding,” Willey said of playing saxophone. “It’s another thing to do. It stimulates my brain in some other way, so that I’m not only playing sports and I can do something else to pass the time too.”

While Hinkle said Willey began to garner some college interest when a few teams showed up to the Vikings’ games this fall, he decided not to pursue any of those options.

With his baseball career possibly in the books — though he did mention possibly trying out for the club team at UMass — Willey can look back satisfactorily on the work he put in over the past four years at PV and where it got him.

“It was just a lot of fun,” Willey said. “I grew a lot as a player and as an individual. I think I just learned a lot.”