GREENVILLE – The Mississinawa Valley Blackhawks traveled to Greenville to take on the Green Wave in a preseason varsity baseball scrimmage at Sater Heights Park on a night Greenville picked its team captains for the season.
“We decided this year to allow our players to vote for captains,” said Greenville head coach, Adam Eberwein. “They were able to vote for two different people and it was pretty well unanimous. Congratulations to Brock Short and Ricky Heidrich for being voted this year’s captains.”
The Blackhawks enter the 2023 season with a young team sporting five freshmen, three sophomores, two juniors and a senior under the direction of head coach, Kyler Guillozet.
“We’re going to be young so it’s going to be a struggle,” said Guillozet, “but I think in the next couple of years we can make a run. We have a good junior high group that is going to be coming up in the next couple of years.”
The Wave came out smoking in the opening two innings denting the board with double digit runs with GHS sophomore Jackson Eberwein crushing a first inning grand slam over the leftfield wall to lead the Wave at the plate.
“When Mississinawa had some struggles getting the ball across the plate – but when they would get it across the plate we were putting the ball in play,” said Eberwein. “Our base running was pretty decent. There are always things we still can improve on but the biggest thing we’ve been talking about with our players, every single time that we come out here to compete and we’re continuously getting better.”
“We have to work on some small things like fielding ground balls clean and throwing people out at first,” Guillozet noted. “We looked good at the plate but our pitching and defense is struggling a little bit.”
“The biggest thing we wanted to do this season was make sure that we did all the little things right,” said Coach Eberwein. “All the little things that we talk about as pitchers, getting ahead in the count, no walks, making people put the ball in play, getting outs when the outs come to us and we did a really nice job of doing that tonight.”
