by Joel Sunshine
The boys varsity baseball team has high expectations to repeat as PVAC champions this season despite the loss of last year’s senior class, which included four all-PVAC honorees. Coach Will Gant thinks that the team has a legitimate shot at winning the championship again. “We’re hoping to fight for the banner, but we have a lot of players to replace,” said Gant. “We’re hoping to get ourselves ready for the tournament, and give us a chance to win it.” The loss of the seniors hurt the team in many respects. “We’re a pretty deep team. We lost a lot of talent,” said sophomore Joshua Krauss. “We lost a lot of power from Zach [Ende], and we lost great pitching from Nathan [Bortnick] and the leadership from Ari [Strait] and Stuart [Tipograph]. It’s tough to make up for a loss that big. The juniors this year help out, and the freshmen coming in make up for a lot of the talent that we lost.” Players feel that the loss of power hitting will not phase them too much. “Hitting has never been our strong suit,” said sophomore Elan Strait. “Last year we showed that we could still win without having outstanding hitting.” However, if there is any let down on offense this season, Gant will look to the juniors to step up. “As far as offensively, I am looking to the juniors to lead the team. We have a couple of guys returning that started, like Aaron Swerdlow, who was our number three hitter and now may move to the leadoff spot,” said Gant. “I would look to him and Eric Horowitz to be our two main junior guys to step up this season.” Gant also feels that pitching will not be too much of a problem this season. “Eric Horowitz will step up pitching-wise. We lost three pitchers, so Eric is the number one pitcher,” said Gant. “We have a couple of young guys that are also pitchers that didn’t pitch for us last year, like Elliot Stixrud and Benjy Himmelfarb.” The leadership role is the juniors’ responsibility as the elders on the baseball team, and they know that they need to meet that challenge. “We really need to work on leading this team. I need to do a better job. I think it is very important that we take charge of the team, take responsibility and that we repeat as champions,” said junior Aaron Swerdlow. “I think we need to be a lot more vocal and a lot more outgoing. We need to show a lot more enthusiasm. We need to help to bring the team together better as a group,” said Stixrud. “We’re going to have to develop new leaders as well as additional mental and physical fitness.” The final element that the team feels is necessary for a championship run is team defense. “We do a lot of situational defense, and work on those kinds of things that we took for granted last year,” said Stixrud. “We have to work on hitting cut-off men. We have to kind of teach a lot to the new guys and reaffirm skills for the veterans.”
Defense is something that Coach Gant also placed a lot of emphasis on prior to the beginning of the season. “We’re big on defense,” he said. “We don’t hit the ball traditionally really well here, so we try to make every routine play that we can defensively.” “We’ve been focusing mostly on defense. We’ll do a lot of live batting practice for the batter, hit and run it out, that way the fielders are working on making their plays. We also field every ball hit in batting practice for an out, whether it is caught in the outfield or a ground ball that is thrown over to first base.” This emphasis on defense and improvement has led to increased confidence and skills for the entire team. “I’m learning a lot in the practices, from juniors, sophomores and the coaches,” said eighth grader Gabi Weisel. “ |
