Bulldogs Baseball Looks Forward to Upcoming Season

Summer sports practices are underway at Hampton-Dumont-CAL and the Bulldogs baseball team will begin their season on Monday, May 19 with a double header versus the Clear Lake Lions.  The Bulldogs will look to get back to being a .500 ball club. After finishing 15-15 and 7-7 in conference in 2023, their record fell to 9-21 and 4-10 in conference in 2024.

The Bulldogs had a really young team last season, with the majority of the players being underclassmen or eighth graders. Most of those players will be returning to this year's team and have gained a lot of experience the past couple seasons. This year’s squad will have seven seniors; Jaxon Moats, Taylor Mahler, Dawson Wikert, Jaymes Stevens, Cam Peil, Wyatt Dean and Brody Robertson. Head coach of the Bulldogs baseball team, Mike Lokenvitz, mentioned how important it is to be returning a lot of the roster. 

“Anytime you can return seven position starters that's pretty good,” said Lokenvitz. “We were fairly young last year and not just having a lack of seniors but at one point we were starting four freshmen and an eighth grader.” 

Lokenvits talked about how the young guys can continue to grow and develop. 

“The biggest thing is for the younger kids to understand they don’t have to be that player that is leaving,” he said. “You know they just have to be themselves and go in and then play the best that they can play. We got a lot of really good young talent on our team so we’re gonna look to improve on what we had last year.”

Despite going 9-21 last season, the Bulldogs started to play more competitively later into the season and were very competitive in their substate playoff game versus Center Point-Urbana, which they lost 5-1. Coach Lokenvits said that this year's team is looking to build off how they played in the last few games of the season last year. 

“So we actually are going to kind of rely on it,” he said. “Take the last week and a half of the season last year. Algona was a really good team last year, they won our conference and had a few division one kids and we played them in a double header and had them beat twice and they just came back in the late innings both times. It’s just the confidence, just knowing that we can compete with some of these guys.”

After only losing three seniors of last year's team, the young Bulldogs squad will look to build off the end of last season and get back to where they know the program can be. The Bulldogs have a scrimmage at home versus Garner-Hayfield-Ventura on Tuesday, May 13 before their regular season kicks off.