UW-Whitewater depends heavily on fall practices to shape and form their team. However, from new players gaining experiences, players exercising their extra year, and a heavy freshman class, the team looks ready to pick right up where they left off last year. 

Head coach John Vodenlich speaks about their limited fall practices, the roster forming, and how they are going to look in the spring. 

Q: What are the fall activities?

A: We are pretty much done for the fall as far as the coaches are concerned. We have 16 contact days that we have used. During those days we would do a combination of things. It would be a long day. We would try and maximize the time we have. It would include both offensive work and defensive work, including batting practice. It’s also a very important time for the evaluation of our team. After we are done, those guys are probably going to keep coming out on their own. They have a key to our gates so they come and go as they see fit.

Q: Are those 16 contact days a regulation set by the NCAA?

A: It is. It’s both a number of contacts and a number of weeks. We always use the maximum allowed in the fall because we use that as an important evaluation piece. Much of our formation of the team is done in the fall because once we go indoors it’s hard to see outfield play and other things like that.

Q: You guys were 36-11 last year, is that something that gets thought about a lot in the fall?

A: No we don’t. That season is over. The mentality for us is that if we don’t win a national championship, we’re really disappointed. We’re happy with how we played, of course. We got to the super sectionals, and at that point there’s only 16 teams in the nation. For us, we patted ourselves on the back and now we are moving on, trying to build this year’s team.

Q: Last year the team had 15 freshmen, now all sophomores, how is that development going?

A: It’s going really well. Because of the pandemic, we have players choosing to come back for another covid year. Ryan Norton’s back. Sam Vomhof is back. Matt Korman is back. Jacob DeMeyer is back. A bunch of guys that we did not expect to come back chose to exercise their extra year. So we’re happy to have those guys back. As far as the young players, guys like Matt Scolan who as a freshman started and is now in his second year with the program. We also have a number of other guys in that category continuing to develop. The fall is an evaluation period for the team, but we’re also making any major adjustments we need to make. Baseball is a lot like golf in that respect. You don’t wait till the 20th game of the season to make a swing change. That happens now. We’ve tried to pinpoint those areas, and they have already started to work on those things.

Q: What are the expectations for the spring season?

A: We probably lost more pitching innings than we ever have. About 330 innings have been lost on the mound. Our top pitcher was a senior and now he’s playing professionally, Weston Muir. He also broke the all-time strikeout record and holds many records for Warhawk pitchers. Not only him, but we’ve lost a ton of great arms, so our focus has been trying to rebuild our pitching staff. Our team is going to look different because of that. I have no doubt that our guys will step up and make the adjustments, and we should be able to put a really competitive team out there.

Overall, the team has some spots they need to fill and things to work on, but that doesn’t seem to be a worry at the conclusion of the fall practices.