Welcome to the 2024 Potomac State Baseball player diary homepage. This season, Sophomores Ben McDougal (Bridgeport High School / Bridgeport, WV), and Kris Sutton (Cobb County High School / Calhoun, GA) will take the lead on the Potomac State Baseball Player Diary.
Welcome back Catamounts to this week's addition to the Potomac State Baseball Player Diary. This week was an especially important week as we played our first games of the year. The many months of not going home, staying on weekends, being the only ones in the cafeteria, the long hours finally become worth it. The week started off with a ton of prep work as the team had practice through the week and our “Code of the Road” meeting Thursday night. The meeting covers everything that the team may need on a road trip as well as how we go about our business during an away series such as this one. Everything from the “Navy Seal Mentality” down to what color socks to wear is covered.
As for the actual weekend, we started off by pulling out of campus at 8:30 A.M. on Friday to head down to the beautiful Sumter, South Carolina where we played the always competitive USC Sumter Fire Ants in a four-game series. Sumter, year in and year out has one of the better programs in the country- so we knew it would be a test. In addition, they already had 12 games under their belt, and we were playing on their home field. Sumter has done some major renovations to Riley Park, so we were looking forward to the challenge.
The trip was a long one to say the least. A little over eight hours. A trip like that can really drive you mad, but we seemed to handle it alright. Most of the guys pass the time by listening to music, watching movies, or trying to sleep the ride away. Some of the guys were even playing a little game of UNO to cure the boredom. Once we arrived at the hotel, Coach Schafer assigned us our rooms, and gave us some time to settle in before heading out to get some grub before our games. The restaurant of choice: Chipotle. Fast forward to an 11:30 p.m. curfew where Coach Schafer went room to room to give us the game plan before we started our first games of the season. After that, there wasn’t much to do but get some shut eye.
To sum up the weekend’s games, we all agree they could have been better. Starting a season 0-4 isn’t on any team’s wish list, but it was a learning experience, nonetheless. A lot of guys on the team got to experience their first college baseball game and see how competitive and alive the games are compared to those of high school baseball games. The speed of the game is always an adjustment for players. Never really a dull moment with everyone on the roster contributing to try and pull out a win. There were a lot of hiccups that were bound to happen early in the season and the good thing about getting it out of the way this weekend is exactly that, we got them out of the way. This is not to say that everything that happened in those first few games was bad. For example, after the first game ended in a loss, we got multiple quality outings out of our pitchers including those of freshman starters Dylan Bell (Hurricane, WV) and Cooper Polcovich (Auburn, NY). As for the hitters, we had a few standouts at the plate with sophomores Nik Rubendall (East Norriton, PA) and Jimmy Sadler (Houston, PA) with 5 and 4 hits respectively, along with freshman Reilly Bubb (Martinsburg, WV) who batted .500 over the course of the weekend.
After the four games, we had a long, quiet, bus ride back to Keyser as the boys reflected on the games. We have plenty more games ahead of us and I have no doubt that the season will end much stronger than we started. This week we plan to clean up our mistakes from the weekend and buckle in for a better series against Lenoir Community College this coming weekend. And as the famous Rocky line goes, “It's not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done.”
As always, I hope you enjoyed this week’s version of the player diary and make sure to check out this week’s video below on YouTube.