As the OVS baseball season began, players and coaches alike came to the field unsure of how the season would unfold.
In previous years, the OVS baseball team has been one of the school’s strongest sports teams at the Upper Campus. However, coming into this year, the roster featured only a handful of veteran players and a mix of less-experienced and less-trained players, some playing for their first time or still relatively new to the sport.
With these factors in mind, coming into the season no one, including the players, knew where this season would take them.
“Coming from last year, I had zero expectations,” said baseball coach Hank Pankratz, who skippered the team for the second season. “We lost some seniors last year who were key pieces so I didn’t know who was going to play where.”
With key roles needing to be filled, many of the veteran players and new players stepped up in a big way this season, helping the squad to an overall record of 5-5, and 2-2 in Omega League play.
The Spuds played their final game at home on Thursday, losing a tight contest 7-6 to Omega League champion Gorman Learning Charter. Behind a strong pitching performance from junior Liam Stevens, OVS led the entire game, only giving up the lead in the bottom of the seventh inning.
Strong fielding by juniors Ben Scordamaglia and Jonathan Castagnini, and sophomore Jay Galgano, hepled OVS hold onto its lead going into the final inning.
Gorman won the game in the bottom of the seventh (this was technically an away game for OVS) on a walk-off single with the bases loaded.
“It was a heck of a battle from the boys,” Mr. Pankratz said. “We’ll be back next year.”
Indeed, the team will only lose a few seniors next year.
One of those is senior captain Sullivan Rockwell, who joined with junior captains Liam Stevens and Keiran Walsh to help guide the team this year.
Liam and freshman Renji Hanai split he majority of the pitching opportunities. And Liam, Keiran, Jay Galgano and Ben Scordamaglia hit well at opportune times to fuel several comeback victories.
To start the season, Sully believed that while the team would do fine, but he worried about that the team’s lack of experience would stop them from performing as well as in previous years.
“I’m going to be perfectly honest I didn’t have super high expectations for it just because of the overall lack of experience,” Sully said.
As the season began, many players, both new and experienced, started to step up and fill key roles, said Ben Scordamaglia
“I saw Jonathan Castagnini stepping up in the outfield, Liam and Renji pitching…Kerian being a wall at home playing catcher, Shuhei (Kotani) playing second with little experience and exceeding everyone’s expectations,” Ben said. “Sully taking charge in the infield catching nearly every ball at first making up for the infields throws especially mine”
Not only did the players show good teamwork and play despite being new to the sport, they demonstrated great spirit in encouraging each other to do their best.
“There was not a lot of complaining going on,” Mr. Pankratz said. “What I didn’t have to worry about was keeping these kids in the game because they just battled and battled and battled and battled.”
It’s this spirit that allowed them to win games despite the hardships that they faced. Whether it was being down by 7 runs and making a huge comeback or having little depth at key positions, the players were able to rise above the challenges.
All the players worked hard and pushed each other and themselves to make for a successful season.
“They just continued to compete,” Mr. Pankratz said. “They worked hard and there was zero quit in them.”