Thanks for checking in Catamount fans for this week’s new Potomac State Baseball player diary. The walls of the gym have been closer and closer each day as the weeks goes by. It’s easy to get cabin fever when being stuck inside for so long. If there is one thing that I have learned the most from my time of being here a Potomac State, it is that college baseball is a grind. Coach Little always repeats it and it is never more true than during the winter practices. It’s easy to get lost in the monotony of the constant loop of repetitions, but to be a good college team, everyone has to grind through it. One repetition can be the difference between winning and losing a game, or the difference between going to the national championship or not. Aside from the monotony, the time of practices can also make practice a true grind.
Practicing in the gym, we obviously have to share the space with both basketball teams, as well as the softball team. And since there are always games and other practices, we have to be very flexible with our practice times. This past week we had our first late practice of the year, and there were a couple that followed after. On some nights, we will have practice at 9 or 10 at night. It’s tough to find the energy to get through a practice that late, but you got to create your own energy so you can take advantage of another day to get better. Also, late night practice is a bit of an inconvenience because most of the time when it’s over, I get hungry, which leads to frequent trips to Sheetz with my roommate Abe Stearns to cure the late-night hunger.
Coach Little has a countdown till the first game, and every practice he lets us know how many days are left till the show starts. As of today, the 28th, there are 20 days left until our first game down south. I feel like I can speak for the rest of the team by saying the day couldn’t come soon enough.
Coming back from winter break, we had lost a lot a few players that were ineligible due to poor performance in the classroom. It can be frustrating because these were players we all were counting on and it left a big hole in the team. However, we did add a new player to the team. Joining us for the spring season is freshman pitcher, Shayne Liller, who is from Parsons, WV. He is in the United States National Guard and has become a student this spring since he has finished up his basic training during the fall semester. Definitely glad to have him as an addition to the team, and he will help out a bunch by increasing our number of pitchers on the staff.
Practices in the gym have changed this weekend since we keep getting closer and closer to the first game of the season. The pitchers are progressing through their throwing program and this week the pitchers started throwing to live hitters in the cage. In the hitting cage that we set up, we put down our portable mound and treat it just like its gameday at Golden Park. On Friday, two pitchers threw three innings each, and on Saturday and Sunday, 4 pitchers threw three innings also. To simulate innings, the pitchers throw 5 pitches to a batter and throw to 3 batters per inning, then the pitchers will switch, one pitcher throwing the top an inning, then the other pitcher throwing the bottom of the inning. For batters, it is good to start getting to see live pitching again, since we haven’t seen it in a couple months. This past weekend, the pitchers were only allowed to throw 75% of full speed, and would tell batters what they are going to throw, so it wasn’t exactly like it will be in a game, but as practices go on, they will progress more. For the upcoming weekend, pitchers will up the speed, as well as throw more pitches to continue to develop their arms, leading up to opening weekend.
In the practices this past weekend, one of our pitchers, Andrew Liller (no relation to Shayne), accomplished a huge baseball milestone. During last year’s fall season, Liller suffered from arm pain in his throwing arm and had to undergo Tommy John Surgery. Anyone who knows a little about the game of baseball probably knows or has heard about this surgery and know it is not an easy thing to recover from. As a pitcher, it pretty much takes you away from the whole game of baseball. To recover, you must go through extensive amounts of healing, exercising, and physical therapy to get your arm back to how it was. For Liller I’m sure it was no easy task having to sit out and put in all of that work to rebuild his arm strength, but needless to say he dealt with it. Before leaving for summer break last school year, he was not able to throw a baseball at all, and upon returning this school year, I had witnessed him throwing again. It is truly such a long process, as he can probably tell you better that I, but all of his hard work led up to this weekend. During Saturday’s practice, Liller got on the mound and threw pitches to live hitters, much like it was a game. I can only imagine the joy that came from achieving that milestone in his career, and I commend his hard work, I think his work really encompasses what this team is all about, and that is putting the time in and doing whatever it takes to achieve success.
We ran into a pretty big problem early in the week during a practice when neither set of bleachers would retract in the Lough gymnasium, leaving us with nowhere to hit. After the coaches did some thinking, we decided to make it a defensive day. Infielders worked heavily on grounders, and outfielders were sent up to our indoor hitting facility in the rec center to do their hitting up there.
For this week’s video, I decided to do another profile on another big Keyser dive restaurant. Anyone from Keyser, or surrounding area more than likely knows of Castiglia’s Italian Restaurant. It’s a small, family oriented, Italian eatery, pretty much right next to our campus. It’s a frequent dinner stop on weekends, and personally my favorite Keyser restaurant. It’s a really homey place that makes a great homemade meals. AND DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE PORTION SIZES. This place’s signature thing how big their pasta portions are. They overflow the plate and no joke easily weighs 5 pounds. You can easily get your daily calories just by eating one meal there. Personally, I’ve never been able to even come close to finishing it all in one sitting, and it’ll usually last me through a whole week, and I’m no timid eater by any means. So, if you guys love Italian food as much as I do, would definitely try it out, and make sure you wear your stretchy pants. Check out my video for this week’s food review of Castiglia’s Italian Restaurant:
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 discussing our Strength and Conditioning Program. We use a program called Volt. Last fall, Coach Little met with the staff from Volt and talked about setting up a program for our team during the season, and during our offseason period. Volt is an app that we can access on our smartphone and provides us with our workout and much more each day. Without the structure of a program like Volt, it can be difficult for players to have structured workouts and a baseball specific program. Each player needs a program catered to them based on whether they are a pitcher or hitter. With Volt, all of this is possible. In the app, Volt builds the workouts and provides instructions on how to do the lifts along with a video that gives us a visual representation on what we should be doing. If we are in our offseason phase, we are scheduled to work out three days a week and go through Hypertrophy, Strength, and Power training. These are all built to maximize our muscle growth and overall strength heading into the season. Once we begin the regular season, the program shifts to two days per week format. It then focuses on maintenance and speed training. This way, we are still getting stronger and maintaining the gains we achieved during the offseason, while saving energy for the grind of a college baseball season.
Throughout the workout, there is an area where we can log our weights, included with the number of reps and sets, we performed for each lift. The program then uses those numbers to modify the number of reps and sets we do for the following workouts. It also determines what weight we should use to progressively move upwards in weight and therefore improve our maximum capability we can lift for that lift. The app also shows our progression from our start and shows what we will continue progressing towards. This helps us have a better understanding of ourselves and our training so we can do what is necessary to become the best player possible for our team.
Volt offers other entities to its training program other than the standard setup of workouts and the analytics portion. They also teamed up with Gatorade to offer a nutrition tab to the app. In this portion, the company gives us various tips on Nutrition, Hydration, and Recovery. All three are essential to becoming the best athlete possible by helping our team stay healthy by eating right and avoiding injury by recovering correctly. In the Nutrition tab, each of the three aspects have their own section where you can read different articles that inform you on various ways to improve your nutrition and lifestyle. This can be anything from finding better ways to improve your diet to performing simple and easy drills that can help the body recover faster between workouts or practices. This portion of the app is new but may prove as very beneficial to the squad this year. For some of us, we never had the luxury of being educated on the correct ways to train, eat, recover, and many other aspects of becoming a better athlete. With Volt, we may now begin to work on each of these aspects. This is just one more way that the coaches do everything possible to help us improve as baseball players in our 2 years at Potomac State!
Originally, I had planned to provide a video showing all of you around the app and giving an up-close view of some players going through a typical weekly Volt workout. Unfortunately, I have experienced some major issues with my MacBook the past week and due to that, am unable to provide a video for this week. I plan to include a video covering Volt and a typical workout in next week’s entry along with a new segment. My apologies to all of you readers.
As for what’s going on around the team, another milestone leading up to our season was reached. On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we had our first weekend of live at-bats during practice. All pitchers threw at 75% of their normal speed and were held to a strict pitch count. Over the next two weekends, this will continue with one more week at 75% and then a week at 100% before we head down to Louisburg, North Carolina to open our season. As a hitter, I can vouch for the rest of my fellow hitters when saying that the live at-bats are a huge help to us. After going almost three months without facing a pitcher at game speed, it is very helpful to get reps in to help each of us get comfortable in the batter’s box once again leading up to the season.
This upcoming weekend, the weather is supposed to finally turn around here in Keyser. During practice, coach Little informed us that Sunday the high temperature is projected to be around 55 degrees. If that is the case, he hinted on the fact that we may be able to practice outside for the first time this spring. That statement created a huge buzz of excitement around the team, as we cannot wait to be outdoors and playing the game we all love.
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!