The Red Knight baseball team is looking to compete for a section championship this year and they may have to rely on a younger team to get them there. The Red Knights lost a lot of talent from last year and will need younger players to fill the void that they left. “We lost Keaton [Studsrud], Jimmy Cron, Michael Kaminski, Sam Lynch-those were our three best players so that was a pretty big loss,” senior captain Tyler Wyvell said. “We will need a lot of players to step up, including the senior players.”

The team is doing a lot of pre-season practicing. “On sunday nights we hit at Players Only and then a couple of days after school we do captains practices in the Plymouth Dome and Friday mornings we throw in the Haben,” senior captain Connor Day said.

As far as practices are concerned for the team, they like to strike a good balance between the different aspects of the game, with intense focus on fielding and pitching along with hitting. “Usually we kind of split [practice] in half, we either hit in the field or in the cages, or we do soft toss. For fielding we do these things called dailies, so coach Wahl and Hoemke hit it to different parts of the outfield and we practice different plays like turning two and cut offs,” Wyvell said.

One thing in particular that the players look for the coaches is to help them with their hitting, as most other areas of the game seem like strengths for the Red Knights. “[We’re going to need] their hitting expertise, we’re going to need a lot of the seniors and even juniors to step up at the plate this year,” Day said.

Being a member of the Metro West Conference for the first year, the team will face a tougher schedule than in previous years; pitching will be key for them to succeed during the season. “I would say [the competition is] tougher, because we switched conferences,” Wyvell said. “I think we’ll be fine if pitching holds its own, we have pretty good fielding and we have really good outfield so it really just comes down to pitching.”

In order for the team to reach its full potential, the team must count on all members of the team to step up, not just one player. “ I would say that everyone needs to step up, the younger kids too because they need to fill in for people that we lost and also get better for the future of the program,” Wyvell said.

In terms of what the team looks to accomplish this season, they want to be somewhat competitive in their conference. “I would say [we want] just to hang in there against the good teams in the conference,” Day said. “I think we have the potential to be good this year, but we have to remain solid in hitting and pitching. We always hope to get to state of course.”