(Avoca) The AHSTW baseball team will make their season debut on Tuesday.
The Vikings open the season next week by hosting Boyer Valley. Trey Brix enters his second season as head coach. “We are really excited about this year’s group. We didn’t graduate anyone from last year. We still have a young bunch, but they have a lot more experience than they did a year ago. We are excited about where we are at. I’m really pleased with the guys. A lot of them played fall ball, took private hitting lessons throughout the winter, and have been committed to coming in for open gyms throughout the spring. They’ve put in the time and hopefully that pays dividends once we get into games.”
As coach Brix alluded to, they bring back a lot of starters. “We are going to lean pretty heavily on Nick Denning and Brayden Lund. Those two were our top two bats last year and Nick was our ace on the mound. Those guys have been good leaders and continue to make themselves better. We have high expectations for those guys. Jacob Coon has put a lot of time in. We are expecting good things out of him both on the plate and at the hill. Working on more consistency, because when he’s on he’s on.”
The Vikings went 7-14 overall last year, but won four of their last five regular season games. “Once those younger guys got to that halfway part of the season you could just see night by night they were growing really fast and improving a lot. The second half of the season was a lot better than the first half.”
Brayden Lund topped the squad last year with a .458 average, seven doubles, and 18 RBI. Nick Denning posted a .403 batting average and led the team with a team high 23 runs scored. Denning posted a 0.61 ERA and 48 strikeouts in 34 1/3 innings pitched.
AHSTW coach Trey Brix:
