The Aplington-Parkersburg summer sports teams will begin their week of games when they travel to Columbus Catholic Tuesday for NICL-Central doubleheaders.
It’ll be the Central openers for the softball team, which is off to an 0-2 start after run-rule losses to Wapsie Valley and BCLUW last week. While the team has batted .194 through the first two games, seniors Avery Freund and Ada Switzer have put together strong starts with .400 averages. First-year head coach Travis Walker on some objectives for the early portion of the season.
“The tough part coaching baseball and softball is trying to be ready for the situations you’re going to encounter in a game,” Walker says. “They’ve been really great about getting their work in leading up to the actual season. The situational stuff, whether it be s situational offense or defense, are going to take some time to develop. With spring sports and all the other sports we have that are wrapping up, it becomes a challenge to even get your squad together. So, we’ve really only had a handful of practices with a full squad, which I know is very common in our area. So that just is what it is. And we’re going to have to kind of hope that by say mid June, we’re doing the things on the field that we’d like to see done.”
Columbus is 0-4, and has hit just .131 as a team. The doubleheader will start at 5:00.
The baseball team will go for its first win after an 0-3 start. They’re working on replacing the production of five starters who graduated from last year’s state tournament team, but head coach Brett Kleespies says the pitching staff is deep.
“Preston Janssen will have to get out behind the plate and get up on the hill for us,” Kleespies says. “We’ll have to rearrange a lineup for that. Sully Janssen will have to throw, and then Jaxson Kleespies will have to throw a little bit as well. He has been throwing in AAU this spring and fall. We’ve got Benny Waller back. And so Benny will be able to kind of get us some innings on the hill as well. Kolbon Hoppenworth, who pitched a lot of JV for us last year, did really well. He’s going to have to see some varsity time this year as well. So we got five, six guys that’ll see some innings, but yeah, we’ll kind of build things around Wes Shirk and Preston and go from there.”
In six innings pitched, Wes Shirk has a 1.17 ERA with a team-high nine strikeouts. Returning to the team for the first time since his freshman season, junior Benny Waller is 3-4 at the plate on the season to lead offensively.
At 2-7, Columbus will go for its first Central win of the season. Eighth grader Quinn Zehentner has led offensively with a 5-7 season so far.
The doubleheader will start at 3:30.
