Young Bulldogs baseball prepares for upcoming season

Last year the Hampton-Dumont-CAL bulldogs baseball team finished the season exactly at .500 with a record of 15-15. This year head coach Matt Lokenvitz said that this year just like every other year the team has a goal set to win 20 games this season. Another goalie to get to the top half of the conference and compete to a district championship.

“Once the season starts you kind of adjust goals depending on how the team is doing and feeling,” Lokenvitz said.

The team is a young one this season and Lokenvitz said that he would like to see confidence and growth from the Bulldogs during the season.

“We are going to throw only a couple of seniors in our starting lineup and we are going to have a bunch of people who have never faced varsity pitching,” Lokenvitz said. “So we want to see them go out there and believe in themselves that they are ready for the moment and they are just as good as the other team that is across from them. We want to see growth from game to game and how they adjust to things. Confidence and growth are going to be huge this season.”

Lokenvitz said that a positive for the Bulldogs is that the team is returning some pitchers that pitched well for them last year. Another positive for the Bulldogs is how athletic the team is this year.

“We are really athletic,” Lokenvitz said. “If we can get that confidence, we can steal a lot of bases and push the pressure on the defense. We can push the envelope a little bit and I think we are going to need to do that to score runs and do that stuff because hitting is much different in varsity to JV so early on hitting might not be our strong suit so if we get guys on base we are going to have to play small ball. We are a talented group just inexperienced.”

With being an inexperienced team Lokenvitz said that there are going to be some bumps in the road this year, but that confidence can help with that.

“If you are inexperienced and not confident that is when you’ll be off to a real slow start,” Lokenvitz said. “So that is why we are really trying to build up everyone's confidence levels and with that you are going to see that growth.”

As the season moves along, Lokenvitz said that he would like to see the Bulldogs be competitive and be in every game. 

“The last two years we have been really good,” Lokenvitz said. “Two years ago we were 23-8 and last year we finished .500 and had some injuries but we have been good and graduated a lot of seniors. But midway through the year you want to be competitive, there is not a lot of blowouts we have been apart of the last few years so it is one of those things for us where we want to be in every game. If you are in every game and are competitive within a couple of runs anything can happen towards the later innings of those games. If we are seeing that type of growth in the season where we are competitive in every game and it doesn’t really matter who we are playing. That’s going to be a bright spot for us.”

The team’s next game is on May 16 at Roland Story at 7:30 p.m.