After graduating over 50 percent of their pitching staff from a year ago, the Clarion-Goldfield-Dows baseball team developed depth and worked varsity innings with an underclassman heavy pitching staff during their 2025 season. The Cowboys utilized 10 pitchers on this year’s roster, six were underclassman. Head Coach Ryan Nail on the necessity of developing pitching depth.
“We really push our guys out of their comfort levels in the offseason, maybe some guys that haven’t been on the mound as much as some others. We really try to push them into that and get them comfortable with that. Throughout our season playing anywhere from 25 to 30 games, we’re going to need pitchers. We’re going to need a pitching staff both at the varsity and JV levels,” says Nail. “We really need as many arms as we can get. With double headers on Mondays, we never know how many we’re going to use right away at the beginning of the week. We need to be prepared to have some arms to finish the week, both conference and non-conference.”
The Cowboys had a 7.44 team ERA. Eighth grader Drew Smith led the staff with a 2.06 ERA in eight games and freshman Jacob Ruba had a 4.14 ERA with a team best 31 strikeouts. Senior Owen Sweeney had the second most strikeouts on the team with 28.
“We really had some success from our younger guys and then a little bit of senior leadership from Owen. Probably our two most innings pitched were both by freshman. We had an eighth grader, Drew Smith, really come around towards the end of the year. It’s really exciting moving into the future with a core group of younger guys, that are hopefully only going to improve.”
The Cowboys are graduating Owen Sweeney and Tate Jackson are projected to return 27 players next year.
