Welcome to the 2019 Potomac State Baseball player diary homepage. This season, Sophomores Andrew Berry (Morgantown High School / Morgantown, WV), and Joel Spishock (Carmichaels High School / Carmichaels, PA) will take the lead on the Potomac State Baseball Player Diary. Note: Berry’s entry will be in BOLD font.
Welcome back to this week’s edition of the Potomac State Diary! Hidden behind the beautiful mountains of West Virginia has many positives: outdoors, amazing views, wildlife, and more. But on the other side of that, this time of year it has one con, and that would be weather. This past week, Keyser felt the first true winter of the year.
Most it all started the past weekend, the 12-13th. On the 13th, the Potomac State baseball team was supposed to hold our annual hitting camp for younger players, but much like the season of baseball, what you plan isn’t always what happens. On Saturday, Keyser was hit with a massive snowstorm, dumping a fair share of snow. So unfortunately, we had to postpone the camp the following Sunday, the 20th. Following Saturday, the winter continued to make its presence known through the rest of the week. We had to deal with more snow throughout the week, especially with another big storm this past Friday, the 18th. Along with that, we had to deal with a multitude of days with freezing temperatures, some reaching single digits. All this cold weather only meant one thing though, and that was MORE GYM PRACTICES.
Like I said in last week’s entry, the gym isn’t the most ideal place to practice, but it is still a great way to make our team better. This past week was another week full of hours of hitting in the gym, as well as hours of bullpens for pitchers. To break up the monotony of all the hitting, Coach Schafer like to add in some competitions to liven up the dead gymnasium. During a couple practices, there would be challenges set up, like being able to bunt tennis balls into a milk-crate, or having to hit a bowling pin and knock it over by hitting a baseball off of a tee. Those are just a couple examples, but there were a couple more, whoever would rack up the most points would win some new clothing courtesy or the one and only, Coach Schafer.
On practice this past Thursday, Coach Little started by what he called a “sad jubilation”, which was that our new assistant coach, Coach Kowalo, just got hired as a new assistant at Virginia Military Institute and was leaving. Coach Kowalo had been with the team since the beginning of the fall and has put nothing but a lot of hard work into the program. He had orchestrated our early infield practice, hitting practices, and was the mastermind behind our new hitting facility in the rec center. For me, as well as my teammates, he taught a lot of his knowledge and has by far helped us improve our defensive and offensive game. Off the field he was also a good mentor and friend. There’s no doubt that he will succeed at his new job coaching at the D1 level.
With his loss, our team seemed to be short staffed, but luckily, our former assistant Mike Kesecker will be coming back for the spring season. Coach K had been with the program for many years, including my freshman year last year, and was an amazing catching coach, as well as first base coach. This past fall he had to discontinue coaching the team because of a newly taken job position, but it’s great to hear that he’ll be coming back!
Also, last week started one of my favorite times of the year which is new gear season. Last week Coach Little handed out our new team hoodies and they are sweet! In the coming weeks leading up to the season, we’ll start getting more new stuff like, shorts, sweatpants, shirts, bags, etc. All of it leads up to one of my favorite days of the year: bat day. On this special day coach hands out our new Rawlings bats for the 2019 season, or “weapons of mass destruction”, as Coach Little would say.
Since we got snowed out for our first hitting camp, this past Sunday we had our final hitting camp of the year which was a combination of both young and old kids. Much like the Sunday before, the weather was not ideal by any means. Everything that was concrete was a sheet of ice. Just walking from the dorms to the gym was a pain, struggling to keep balance and not fall, so I’m sure the roads weren’t much better. But despite the odds, we had a great turnout. To kick off the camp, our coaches introduced themselves and went over our hitting philosophy. It can be a lengthy topic to explain, but coaches summarize it for our campers. After that we split up and stretched out. Once everyone was loose, all the kids were divided into small groups and dispersed throughout the gym. There were a multitude of hitting stations, but really it was similar to our indoor practice as far as drills go. There was bunting, tee work, batting practice, and more. It was a great day getting to interact with the kids and help bring up the next generation of ball players. To see a video of our camp, check out my friend Berry’s video on our Potomac State Baseball YouTube page. And once, the camp was over, that concluded the week.
For this week’s video, I decided to show you guys what our dorms look like inside, along with our baseball clubhouse. We’re very fortunate to have the clubhouse we do, it’s extremely nice! So check out my video on the Potomac State YouTube page on to see what we’re working with, MTV Cribs Style!
Thank you for tuning into this week’s player diary! Please join in next week for updates on the team, as well as some exclusive team videos. Also, for more coverage follow the teams twitter (@PotomacStateBB) and Instagram (@potomacstatebaseball). If you have any questions or suggestions on videos, please email me at jts0033@mix.wvu.edu.
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Welcome back Catamount faithful to this week’s edition of the Potomac State Baseball Player Diary. In this week’s edition, I will be covering our annual Winter Hitting camp held in the Lough Gymnasium. It was originally planned to hold two separate camps, one for kids aged 6-12, and another for players between the ages of 13-18. Due to Keyser receiving around 4 inches of snow last weekend the night before camp, Coach Little and Coach Schafer decided to postpone it until this week and combine the two age groups. Mother Nature was not very helpful this week either, as another 3 inches of snow and a wintry mix hit Keyser from Saturday Morning until early Sunday morning. The coaches decided that we couldn’t cancel both weekends of camp, and therefore decided to tough it out and hold the camp anyway.
With there being inclement weather, it was very uncertain as to how many campers would show up. The roads were very icy from the storm the night before. It was so bad that when walking to the gym, my teammate Tobias Holmelund (Copenhagen, DEN) and I both had experiences that came very close to us slipping and busting our butt on the ice. Coach Schafer experiences the pain of icy roads too. It took him around ten minutes to walk from his parked car into the gymnasium one small step at a time. The camp still had a very solid turnout of players which was less than usual, but with very unfavorable conditions it was a respectable turnout. These campers traveled from all over the region as we had kids show up from as close as right at home in Keyser and as far as Baltimore, MD.
It was a very fun day with a lot of work for the campers. It began with Coach Schafer introducing the team and Coach Little. He then gave a rundown of camp and how it would run before handing it off to Coach Little. He spoke about college baseball and what is most important for kids trying to advance in baseball. One thing he could not stress enough is doing well in school. If you do not do well in school it makes it much more difficult or even impossible to advance in baseball, not matter how far you wish to make it. One of his quotes he always tells our team is, “On this team you need to do 2 things, get As and Bs in the classroom and Ws on the field.” He preaches that if we can do that then we will be a very successful group of student-athletes.
Following Coach Little’s talk, Coach Schafer gave the rundown on our teams hitting philosophy. He talked about different aspects of hitting like launch angle, getting on plane with the ball, and various other things. Once finished, he went over what the stations for the day would be. Coach described the purpose of each drill and how the rotations would work. Following that, the team split up and was assigned to groups of campers. Throughout the day we followed the campers around and interacted with them while running the drills. For a closer look at the day of camp, here is a collection of pictures and videos that I was able to capture throughout the day.
This past week was an eventful one here at Potomac State. Our second wave of gear for the spring came in as all players received their sweatshirts for the spring. The freshman on the team also received their winter coat and beanie so they don’t freeze during our first month or so playing at home.
Practice has been moving right along with pitchers conditioning daily and this week they will be moving up to 75% speed on their bullpens. This means one thing, that the season is near! For the hitters, we have been working on getting in as many reps as possible, while also working on some strategical things with Coach Schafer. To get in extra reps, the coaches decided to put “The Lab” to good use and implemented hitting groups around lunchtime on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Depending on our schedule we either are a part of the 11:00, 1:00, or 2:00 group and hit for an hour. This helps us get in as many possible gameday reps leading up to opening day. I find it very useful as a large majority of us hitters just sit around and waste time between classes by either playing videogames or messing around on our phones to kill time. Now instead of wasting that time we are being efficient and using as much time as possible in our day to improve as ballplayers.
To close out this week’s diary I would like to congratulate our Assistant coach Andrew Kowalo on being offered and accepting an Assistant Coach position at Virginia Military Institute. It is a division I school and a member of the Big South Conference. Even though his time with our team was short he was more helpful than he will ever know. To speak for the rest of the team, we appreciate everything he did for us. Good luck coach Kowalo!
That’s all for this week’s edition. If you have anything you would like to see in the diaries or learn more about, you can contact me thru email (akb0019@mix.wvu.edu) or twitter (@andrewberry_15). I would also encourage you to follow the team on social media. Please subscribe to our YouTube account @PotomacStateBaseball to be notified when Joel or I upload a video. Thank you for reading, and until next week, Go Catamounts!