Peyton Sipila returning to improve on last year’s season.
Hawk Baseball officially started their season with a scrimmage with Llano last Tuesday night at the Canyon Lake Diamond.
This will be a year where Head Coach Trent Dunavant will need to use a calculator in counting the number of players in his dugout.
“I don’t know….35?,” Coach Dunavant stated when asked how many players he had practicing and wanting to play this year. “We will carry around 14-15 for Varsity and over 20 for Junior Varsity.”
Coach Dunavant had a long pause when asked that question of players wanting to play, as in the past few years, those questions could easily been answered by looking at both hands and counting fingers.
Last year, Canyon Lake started a wave of players that started to influx this sport and the Hawks still had several players that had Sophomore besides their name giving you a hint of age.
Now those Sophomores will be classified as Juniors and that might hopefully translate into victories for a program that had not made the playoffs in three years.
“We will have competition on this team and that will be something that should make them better,” Coach Dunavant fielded. “We have more optimism than in the past and we will have multiple guys playing multiple positions.”
The Hawks seemed to be strong in the infield and will have more qualified players for those spots this season.
“We have infielders that will be able to compete for outfield positions if they can’t win their spot in the infield,” Dunavant said without error. “This was our first scrimmage and we had some things good and bad. We found things that need working on, and things that the kids retained from last year.”
“We did ok playing defense but bats are slower than pitching at this time of year and pitchers are mainly throwing fast balls.”
Catcher will be a position to keep an eye on as the Hawks lost a big bat and fielder when Michael Brady got his diploma last May.
“We had Kyle Krohn play a nice game yesterday and he will be fighting this position out with Bryce Dehlin and Colton Avey,” Coach Dunavant commented. “Peyton Sipala will be able to play anywhere, left field, first base, short stop…”
The pitching will have several players ready for their chance to make things happen….if you take one thing from Coach Dunavant on pitching, it is throw strikes.
“We walked way to many players last night,” Dunavant said. “If you throw strikes in high school, then nine times out of ten the batter will find a way to get out.”
“Throwing harder does not mean you can pitch, sometimes throwing an 85 mile per hour pitch down the middle will not do as well as a pitcher that throws a 75 mph pitch on the corner,” Dunavant reiterated.
When asked about what they would be looking for in finding a closer for this club, Coach Dunavant did not hesitate, “A closer is not afraid of failure and it is how they approach their game mentally and having pin point control. If they (pitchers) can’t throw strikes then they won’t be out there.”
“I want to be around four to five pitchers when district rolls around,” Coach Dunavant closed. “We have more athletic kids than positions this year.”
Canyon Lake will be wearing their coats this Friday as the weather could be frigid if Seguin does not help in changing the game to Saturday.
If that happens, then CL will be playing in Seguin rather than at Canyon Lake.
The ReSporter knows that Seguin is warmer than CL since it is so much further South.
Should be a good season…hopefully the season will end later in the year when temperatures get much warmer…thanks Coach and good luck.
