After winning the Centennial League last season, the Grandview Varsity Baseball team looks forward to another season, possibly a two-peat. The team has spent the off-season wisely, training and improving from last year.
“We were focused a lot on hitting this off-season. We hit more than we have in any other off-season here at Grandview,” Head Coach Scott Henry said, “Our pitchers also got a lot of work in to get their arms in shape for a long season.”
Senior Tucker Smock, who is a second baseman and outfielder, spent his offseason with the Grandview Baseball team getting ready for the season making his goals clear for the team.
“My goals are to help the team win and help us have success this year,” Smock said.
With success in mind, coaches and players are now concerned with filling the roles of last season’s class of departed seniors.
“We had 14 seniors in last year’s club. It will be tough to replace them,” Henry said. “But one of the many aspects of coaching at Grandview that I am grateful for, is the fact that we have a lot of good young players every year.”
However, senior and shortstop Tony Crow feels that newer players may need more time to adjust to the varsity environment.
“Our strengths are our pitching and our ability to win by doing the little things,” Crow said. “Our weaknesses are our younger lineup that we put out with graduating and 4 of our best hitters last year.”
Crow feels that to fix this weakness they will just need to give the new players time to adjust to the team atmosphere.
“We’re gonna work on our weaknesses by getting the younger kids into varsity games early so they can understand what it is like to play on that level of competition,” Crow said
With new players on the team, new leaders are expected to step up to the plate and help them learn the ropes of the varsity team. While this can be a tough task, returning players show their dedication.
“We have a lot of pitchers returning from last season. They all have shown that they can pitch in big moments for us this year. We also have our starting ShortStop, and starting Catcher returning this year,” Henry said.
The returning players will be big this season, but they will also need to be leaders for new players.
“They have shown great leadership so far in the pre-season, and we have some players that are making the move from JV last year to Varsity this year,” Henry said. “Their excitement for this year’s opportunity is contagious.”
Focusing on the season ahead, the team has been preparing rigorously during practice, targeting their weaknesses from last season.
“We also put a huge emphasis on baserunning. We are hoping to continue to be one of the leaders in stolen bases again this year,” Henry said.
Coach Henry has a strong mentality of not believing statistics, as he reminds his players to not focus on the statistics, but instead on the game.
“We talk a lot about trusting the process and not focusing too much on the results,” Henry said. “That is very hard to do in baseball because we surround ourselves with statistics.
The team’s focus on their stats has turned into a problem as they feel like their value on the team is all about their statistics.
“It gets elementary to start to believe your value to the team lies in those statistics. We try to make sure that our players understand that those statistics can lie at times and to trust the process,” Henry said.
With the season already underway, Coach Henry continues to use his program-wide strategy of taking things slow one thing at a time, and the team is hopeful to reach a new goal.
“I’m expecting for the team to have a lot of success and I think that we can do something that no other Grandview Baseball Team has done: Winning the state championship,” Smock said.
