Healdsburg's Six-Peat: What the Prune Packers Actually Pulled Off This Summer

How many summers does a town get to call something "the streak" before it stops sounding like a streak and starts sounding like the weather? If you have lived in Healdsburg through any part of the last six years, you have probably absorbed the fact that the Prune Packers win. You have heard it at the farmers market, seen it on a banner near the Plaza, maybe caught the tail end of a game while walking past Rec Park on a Tuesday night without meaning to stop. What most of us have not done is stop to add up what that actually amounts to, because the number is stranger than the shrug it usually gets.

This year the Prune Packers swept the Lincoln Potters in the Pacific Empire League championship series, winning 8-2 on the road at McBean Stadium in Lincoln and then closing it out 9-1 back home at Recreation Park. That gave the club its third consecutive Pacific Empire League title. It also extended something bigger: a run of six consecutive championship seasons, stretching back through a different league entirely. A team from a town of roughly 11,000 people has now been the best in its league every single summer since 2021, and it did that in two leagues that did not both exist when the streak started.

Three Titles, Then a New League, Then Three More

The mechanism behind this is the part that gets lost in the shorthand. From 2021 through 2023, the Prune Packers won three straight California Collegiate League championships. That is a real accomplishment on its own. What happened next is the detail worth sitting with: rather than defend a fourth CCL title, the organization left the league at the end of 2023 and became a charter team in a brand-new circuit, the Pacific Empire League, built for the 2024 season alongside teams including the long-established Humboldt Crabs, the Lincoln Potters, the Medford Rogues, the Solano Mudcats, and the West Coast Kings.

Then the Packers won that league too. In 2024. Again in 2025. And again this year.

Most dynasties get to coast on familiarity, playing the same rivals and the same ballparks year after year until winning becomes routine. This one changed leagues in the middle of its run and kept the streak alive anyway, against a fresh slate of opponents that had never faced the Packers before 2024. That is a different kind of dominance than repeating a title in a league you already know how to beat.

The Numbers From This Particular Summer

The 2026 season was not a squeaker. It was, by the club's own account, one of the more lopsided versions of a run that has already been lopsided for half a decade.

• Opening weekend: a 12-1 win over the Stockton Pearls, followed the next night by a 17-1 win over the Bay Area Marauders.
• A six-game winning streak to open the year with a combined score of 84-11, before the first loss of the season, an 8-6 defeat to the Chico Lone Wolves.
• A 16-3 record through the month of July.
• The championship series itself: 8-2, then 9-1.

Those are not the numbers of a team squeaking into a sixth title on reputation. They are the numbers of a team that, by the time the crowd was showing up on a given Tuesday night, had usually already decided the outcome by the fourth inning.

The Grandstand That Was Never Built for Baseball

Here is the part most residents drive past without knowing. Recreation Park, at 515 Piper Street, has hosted the Prune Packers since the Healdsburg Chamber of Commerce leased the ground at University and Piper streets in February of 1921 and the first game was played that May. The wooden grandstands you sit in today, though, were not built for that. They started their life as seating at the Cotati Speedway and were brought over to Healdsburg in 1923, two years after the park itself opened. The first major restoration of those stands did not happen until 2011, and it happened the way a lot of things happen in this town: community volunteers and local fundraising, not a developer or a league office.

Those are the same stands a Press Democrat photographer captured fans sitting in on a Tuesday night this July, watching the Packers beat the Lincoln Potters in the regular season, more than a century after the wood first held anyone's weight, on a different sport, in a different city. The visiting bullpen that night sat under an old oak tree at the edge of the field, which is either a charming coincidence or proof that some corners of this park have not changed much on purpose. You can read more about the park's origins and the team's full history on the Prune Packers' own site and in the club's Wikipedia entry, which cites the original 1921 Healdsburg Tribune coverage of the team's founding.

Who Actually Runs a Six-Peat

Dominance this consistent usually traces back to a small number of people who stayed put. Joey Gomes was in his 14th season as general manager and head coach when this year's team opened the schedule, which means he has been building rosters in Healdsburg since before the streak began and has now overseen every single title in it.

The front office tells a similarly local story. Natalie Norman joined the organization as Director of Development in 2023, was promoted to CEO in 2024, and has served as President of the Pacific Empire League since its founding, meaning the same person helping run the hometown team also helped build the infrastructure of the entire league it now plays in. Under that leadership the club also brokered a partnership with New Era, which now produces the team's on-field caps, a small but real sign that a summer collegiate club playing out of a 1921 ballpark has built something with actual reach.

None of this comes with a big-league budget. General admission tickets at Rec Park have run in the range of six to ten dollars in recent seasons, kids get in free, and the concessions have historically rotated among local restaurants with Healdsburg Brewing Company supplying the beer. The organization is a registered 501(c)(3), and the club has run charity theme nights over the years, including a fundraiser tied to Guy Fieri's foundation supporting kids' culinary education. Between innings, it is the Healdsburg Community Band's pep section that plays, an all-volunteer group that keeps its own rehearsal schedule at Healdsburg High School and shows up at Rec Park through August every summer. A six-time championship run, in other words, has been paid for the same way most things in this town get paid for: ticket by ticket, donation by donation, one local business at a time.

What This Means If You Have Been Half-Watching

If you caught even one game this summer, or meant to and let it slide, it is worth understanding the shape of what just happened before the count resets to one next June. This was not a team defending home turf against familiar faces. It was a team that left a league it had already conquered, walked into a new one full of strangers, and came out the other side having won that too, three times running, capped by a two-game sweep that was barely close.

Most of us who live here have filed the Prune Packers under pleasant summer background noise, something you notice on the drive past Piper Street more than something you track. The stands are still the 1923 stands. The coach is still the coach who has been here for fourteen years. And the streak, six years long now and built across two different leagues, is a lot less ordinary than the shrug it usually gets around town.

Healdsburg has a way of holding onto things that work quietly for a long time, whether that is a ballpark grandstand borrowed from a speedway a century ago or the kind of neighborhood texture that only comes from actually living somewhere. If you are thinking about what it means to put down roots in a town that still runs on volunteer bands and rotating restaurant concessions and a coach who stays for fourteen years, Ceci Cook would love to talk through what that looks like for you. Let's Connect.