Baseball action is getting in full swing this week. As the season begins, CGD Head Coach Ryan Nail looked ahead to preview what will be a momentous season.
It's a pretty exciting season coming up for us. Obviously, we have some new facilities coming and we are very excited to open those this season. We have also added some exciting opportunities to our schedule for our players and fans. We will host a Memorial Day Game this season, play at Principal Park and also play a game in Rippey at a field they are restoring. We've added nearly 8 non-conference games this season to give our guys opportunities to grow outside of our loaded conference. This will be my first season that we have actually had an off-season and I am excited to see those efforts pay during the season.
We only graduated two seniors last year, so we return the majority of our offense and defense. We will look for some leadership from our seniors: Cael Chase, Nick Carpenter and Thane Jackson, with Cael being a returning all-conference selection. We also have Juniors Preston Gardner and Nevan Foss who round out our outfield and most of our offensive production from last year. We have a big group of sophomores this year as well that we will be looking to get some production out of starting right away.
We have a couple of new juniors out this year between Eli Toomsen and Erick Perez and we are really thrilled that they are out and fighting for playing time right away. Owen Sweeney is a freshman that played quite a bit of JV for us last year and will be vying for some playing time at our varsity level.
We play in a really tough conference, but we know we have a good chance to compete. Humboldt and Webster will be really tough again this year along with Algona, Clear Lake and Hampton. We need to do a good job of wiping the slate clean every night and trying to go 1-0 every game. This will give us the best opportunity to compete night in and night out. Last year we really competed well in all non-conference games and had a lot of 1-3 run games and this year we will look to get over the hump to get some wins in those situations.
We are really excited to open up the new complex this year and go from near the bottom to the top in facilities for baseball in the state of Iowa. With these new facilities, comes responsibility on the players and the coaching staff to perform as well. We will have larger crowds than normal especially with softball being right next to us, so we have to make sure we prep for every game to perform at the top of our capability night in and night out. Although we will not begin the season on the new fields, 20 of our 30 games are home this year so there will be plenty of opportunities to play in front of our home crowd and that is something we are really excited about.
Our goal is to continue to grow as a baseball team into a contender each and every night. CGD Baseball hasn't been in a great state the last few years, so we are building the structure back up underneath of it to give it a strong base. Once we get our base, then we start working on all of the small thing to become contenders year in and year out. There are a lot of excited youth in our community, and we need to continue with that positive energy to keep kids out and keep kids coming to the ballpark.
Our motto this year is "It Starts Here" and that can be said every night. Every night the goal of 1-0 starts here and so does the future of CGD Baseball.
