Yellowjackets Baseball

For spring break we went to Vero Beach Florida, former spring training facility of the Dodgers. As everyone knows here, it’s not warm in Superior in spring so we all couldn’t wait to get there. But, we had a 28 hour ride before we could step out on that green field. On the way down we do our annual bus ride traditions. To start off the trip, the team took coach’s baseball test. To play, you have to pass this test with a 90% or better. The test can be about anything in baseball, but mostly about our team. If you fail, you better study up because you are taking it again. After that, we read our poems that we wrote. Every player writes a poem about our team, players and coaches. They get pretty funny but it’s all in good fun. From there, it’s about 22 more hours till Florida. Once we got there, everyone was relieved to be off that bus. The night before sleeping wasn’t exactly a 5 star hotel, as every player can tell you they didn’t get much sleep. But as soon as we got on the field, we were ready to play some ball in the warm Florida weather. The first game of the week we played against St. Mary’s college, and grinded it out for the 6-4 win with Sean Cummings and Paul Schlangan hitting two solo shots. The next day, we played New England College where the bats came alive. Everyone contributed with hits and scoring runs in the two games as we outscored them 31-6 for the two wins. 14-0 and 17-6. Joe Ahrens hit his first college homerun in the first game, and it was a bomb. All day the pitchers were throwing strikes and getting their job done with an exceptional performance. Nick Bursik threw the first 6 and got his first win of the season, and Chris “Fudge” Ransom came in to close. In the second game, Alex Lagadin started off throwing 4 innings, then Bobby Tyndall came in for two, and Jonny Brattengeier came into close the 7th. We played St. Mary’s again on Wednesday and came out big with the 12-5 win, a much better performance than the first. Freshman Matt Prosek started off the game and pitched very well for his first start. Mike Swanson came out of the pen for two innings of work, followed by sophomore pitcher Andrew Lange to finish things off. The offense worked the bats in the second scoring 8 runs to shut the door early. On Friday, we had a double header vs. Central Iowa. We lost the first game 1-12, but coach challenged us to answer back. We took that to heart and got rolling. We came back with an 8-5 win. Senior TJ Wink took the mound for the win pitching a strong start. Bobby Tyndall came in late to close the door on them. Our trip ended with a game against Scholastica. They are our new bridge rivals and no one wanted to beat them more than us. But we were too tense out there and made rookie mistakes. Dan Lindsey pitched very well doing his job, but we couldn’t get the D working behind him to help him out. We ended up losing 0-9. We learned a lot from this game though. We learned not to be so tense and just be loose and play ball. We won’t be making these mistakes again and was good practice for conference play. It was a good learning experience for everyone. After that, it was all over and we were headed back for Superior. It was a good trip, improving our record to 6-3 and got some good playing time outside on the field. As for now, we are going day by day and focusing on the little things and keep getting better.

This weekend we will be going to Chicago to play 2 double headers Saturday and Sunday. These are our last non conference games before we go down to Oshkosh April 10th.

We Are Superior