For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with USU baseball, let me fill you in. To begin, I believe it is important to clarify that Utah State competes in National Club Baseball, an intercollegiate league of baseball players, and is not an actual “school team” that can offer scholarships. But this didn’t stop our boys from taking the National Championship title just last season. It was a wonderful end to a great year, but no one could have seen the surprise of us going from National Champions to losing 4 games in pre-season this year.
Don’t worry though. This story has a happy ending.
After 4 losses, USU baseball came back with 6 straight wins. Curious as to how such a drastic change in momentum could come about, I decided to take my questions straight to the source—Head Coach Brad Singer.
This is Brad Singer’s first year as head coach for the USU baseball program, and he talked about how the transition was going for both him and his players. He stated that overall, “It’s gone pretty smooth. It’s about establishing a philosophy, going back to discipline and keeping some sort of organization about the program.”
Singer explained what went wrong during the four pre-season games. “In the beginning of the year we played with wood bats and… our style as a team is to swing with aluminum bats. It’s a very different game to go from swinging aluminum bats to wood bats.”
Wood has an incredibly smaller “sweet spot” than aluminum, making it much more difficult to hit the ball as far as they want it and where they want it. This is one of the major factors to the rocky start of our baseball team’s season. However, Singer adds that he prefers “wood bats during pre-season because when (the team) makes that transition over to a metal bat, the sweet spot grows significantly… and they are able to find that sweet spot much more often.”
With a smile, Singer said the prospects for the rest of the season look “very good. I think we are playing really good baseball and have hit some great momentum on not only the defensive side of the ball, but offensive as well. The players are starting to catch that vision and come together and play as one. And that’s really the key.”
According to Singer, things are looking good for USU’s baseball program. But without the support of their fans, they will never be able to make it back to the championship game to reclaim their rightful title.
To see where and when our baseball team will be playing, check out their site.
