When San Diego City College pitcher Aiden Kuei took the mound on a Saturday in late February, he approached the game the same as he always had.
But this one felt a little different.
“Honestly, it was a little odd because it was just a game that we had added to our schedule that week,” Kuei said.
The freshman kinesiology major, who normally pitches on Saturdays, got to work and did something no other Knight has done in over 20 years.
He threw over a hundred pitches, striking out 11 batters in the process, for his first no-hitter in a 10-0 rout of California Miramar University at Morley Field.
“I just went into it with the same mindset with all my starts, like just one batter at a time, one pitch at a time and just keep on attacking hitters,” Kuei said.
Official statistics before 2007 are unavailable, but Knights head coach Chris Brown said he couldn’t remember seeing a no-hitter happen in his 26 years at City.
Earlier this year, Brown brought in former professional pitcher Jon Sintes, who runs Cutter Nation, a data-driven, high-tech training facility, to work with the pitchers at City.
Sintes, who pitched for multiple Mexican League Baseball clubs, said he’s been increasingly impressed by Kuei, calling him an assassin because he often appears unfazed despite the pressures of being a starting pitcher.
“Kuei is just my guy,” Sintes said. “He’s got the cutter, he’s got the two-seam. He’s really out to learn the game, like instead of just juice, how nasty can we be, plus juice.”
Despite the monumental achievement, Kuei remains dedicated to the team’s goal of competing for a championship while at City and is appreciative of the Knights’ coaching staff.
“Coach Brown is awesome,” Kuei said. “(Sintes has) really helped me throughout the fall, getting to where I am now.”
As of March 27, Kuei leads the Pacific Coast Athletic Conference in strikeouts (62) and is second in wins (6), most recently at Imperial Valley, where he faced 29 batters and struck out four, in a 6-2 win for City.
He was also named February’s PCAC Athlete of the Month after going 4-0 in 28 innings with 31 strikeouts.
The desire to compete and play baseball began when Kuei’s father, Chester Kuei, took him to watch the San Diego Padres play at Petco Park.
As a kid, Kuei recalled asking his dad, who would become his Little League coach for a time, every year when he could play.
“It all happened when, at the age of seven, we started him out … doing little league baseball, and (we) fell in love ever since,” Chester Kuei said. “It was very fun coaching Little League games.”
Typically, following Little League is when competition ramps up for youth baseball players, and Kuei was up for the challenge.
He would go on to play four years at Del Norte High School in Poway under varsity head coach Rielly Embrey, who said Kuei maintained his composure despite being “thrown into the fire” his senior year.
“He experienced individual success during his time in high school, and at the same time, our program experienced great results,” Embrey wrote in an email to City Times Media.
Kuei decided to pitch exclusively his senior year and found success on the mound, giving up his bat and instead choosing the one-on-one competition between a batter and the pitcher.
“Throwing a no-hitter at any level of baseball is incredibly difficult, and doing it in a nine-inning game at the college level is even more impressive,” Embrey wrote. “Aiden has always had great command on the mound, so I’m not surprised that he was efficient enough to make it through a complete game.”
Embrey recalled back-to-back starts when Kuei threw five shutout innings in a close win against eventual CIF-San Diego Section Open Division champions Torrey Pines.
He then responded with a four-hit complete game shutout against San Marcos, the eventual CIF-SDS Division I winners.
“I think those two starts against quality teams loaded with future college-level players were the first real indication that Aiden had a chance to continue pitching after high school,” Embrey said.
Kuei made it to the CIF semifinals in both his junior and senior years and won a league championship in 2023.
After high school, Kuei decided to take a year off. But he began to feel the itch to compete again in baseball when a friend told him about the team at City College.
That friend, another former player from Del Norte, was City College pitcher Gabriel Esteban.
“They’re both good teammates, and he really enjoyed having the camaraderie, having a teammate (from Del Norte) again on the team,” Chester Kuei said.
Esteban played at City last season, and in a recent game against Grossmont on March 13, came in to close out the game after his friend.
The pair struck out 13 batters in a 7-2 loss against the No. 2 team in the PCAC.
Striking a balance between the highs of winning and the lows of losing has always been a mental bridge that athletes face, especially baseball pitchers.
Unity and accountability are two main tenets the Knights will stand on, Aiden Kuei said, as they move deeper into the season and look to shake off a rough stretch of losses.
“Since the beginning of fall, since the beginning of the first couple practices, we always talked about … winning a state championship,” Kuei said. “So that’s still the goal, no matter where we are.”
This story was edited by Tresean Osgood and Itzel Martinez.
