A dozen letterwinners, including seven seniors, return for Waukon baseball in 2015

For the second consecutive season, the Waukon baseball team will return a dozen players with varsity letterwinning experience, and this year’s crew will look to improve on last season’s 6-25 overall diamond campaign. Included within that veteran core is a group of seven seniors, most of whom are multi-year letterwinners who would like nothing more than for this to be their best high school baseball season yet.
That list of senior veterans includes Adam Benzing, Sully Bucheit, Michael Howe, Marshall Lyons, Jake Ronan, Landon Sivesind and Brock Waters, and they will be looked to for providing leadership to an equally impressive number of younger players in the Waukon baseball program, as 40 young men in grades eight through 12 have reported for early-season duties. Additional returning letterwinners include juniors Haden Hammel, Peyton Hesse, Will Keenan and Chris Miller, as well as freshman Mitchell Snitker.
“These guys got a lot of experience last year playing,” third-year Waukon head baseball coach Jerry Keenan said of his veteran crew. “They bring a lot of leadership to the team.”
That leadership comes in a variety of forms, including some team-high numbers from last season. Bucheit and Ronan provided a majority of the offensive leadership for last year’s team, Bucheit driving in a team-high 17 runs on team second-best totals of 25 hits and a .309 batting average while Ronan paced the offense with 30 hits and a .337 batting average.
Both also contributed heavily to the Indian pitching efforts last season, each of them with over 34 innings pitched. Hammel emerged to the forefront of the Tribe’s mound efforts last season with 48-1/3 innings and a team-high 39 strike-outs and team-low earned run average (ERA) of 5.65.
A veteran crew that large obviously brings with it a variety of strongpoints, as Coach Keenan notes. “The strength is going to be that most of these guys got a lot of experience playing last year as sophomores and juniors,” he said. “They are tremendous young people, on and off the field, and they work extremely hard and play as a team. We have tremendous team speed. We need to be able to get these guys on base and put ourselves in better game situations to be aggressive on the basepaths.”
Coach Keenan knows, however, that just bringing back a large number of players with experience isn’t necessarily enough to compete within the schedule that faces his baseball Indians again this season. “We will still need to develop the pitching, as our conference, as well as our non-conference, schedules are going to be tough,” he noted. “One of the keys to a successful season will be pitching and defense. We need to cut down on the number of walked batters and play better defense behind our pitchers. We need to get quality at-bats and do a better job with runners in scoring position.”
Graduation took a trio of seniors from the Indian baseball starting line-up last summer. Tyler Benzing, Parker Hesse and Sam Schwartz played some key infield roles for the diamond Tribe. “We lost senior starters last season who were contributors to our line-up,” Coach Keenan remarked. “We need guys to step up and fill those roles.”
Four of last season’s six total wins came during a seemingly consistently strong Northeast Iowa Conference (NEIC) schedule which resulted in the Indians finishing in seventh place. Coach Keenan doesn’t see much, if any, let-up in that NEIC line-up this season.
“Our conference is going to be very tough,” he speculated. “Waverly-Shell Rock is the defending conference champion and a State qualifier, and they return most all of their pitching. New Hampton has a tremendous squad and has one of the best pitchers in the state of Iowa (University of Iowa signee Cole McDonald), and Decorah is always a perennial power. Oelwein, Charles City and Crestwood have great programs and we will be in for a battle every game that we play.”
Coach Keenan sees improvement within that Northeast Iowa Conference as one of this season’s many goals. He sees that final result improvement getting its fuel from that same type of goal within the fundamental basics of the game of baseball.
“The goals I have for this season are for us to get good pitching, play better defense, do a good job of getting quality at-bats, and for us to continue to improve as the season goes on,” he explained. “I would like to see us be the most improved team in the conference and for us to get better every time we take the field and be playing our best baseball at postseason time.”
The third-year head coach looks at the best off-season commitment he’s had in his short tenure as being a great headstart to achieving those goals, and he sees that commitment continuing as the season gets underway. “Our open gym sessions were the best we’ve ever had this year, and we really focused on mechanics and fundamentals before we really even picked up a baseball,” Keenan explained. “The attitudes and work ethic have been outstanding.”
Coach Keenan looks beyond just the players he has this season for additional assets to the program, although one of Waukon baseball’s mainstays will not be part of the program for the first time in nearly two decades. “This year will be the first in twenty-plus seasons that Andy Sires will not be with the program,” Coach Keenan said.
Taking over the assistant coaching duties will be another Kee High School graduate and former baseball player, Joey Lapel. “Joey played high school ball under Coach Gene Schultz at Kee High and brings a great deal of knowledge and passion for the game,” Keenan remarked.
Former Waukon baseball stand-out Blaine Snitker will also return for his third season as Waukon baseball’s eighth/ninth grade coach. “Blaine is a former First Team All-State performer for the Indians,” his head coach said. “This will be Blaine’s third season in that position and he has done a tremendous job.”
Additional help will come from a pair of volunteer coaches who bring a high degree of baseball experience with them. Tyler Ronan was a senior member of the Indians’ 2011 State Tournament team, and Jordan Wolfe is a 2013 Waukon High School graduate who has been playing baseball at Cornell College the past two years.
“Tyler was an outstanding baseball player for Waukon, batting nearly .600 as a senior,” Coach Keenan said. “He has a love for this game and has provided the guys with a better approach to the hitting game, which is visibly evident in the early practices. Jordan brings his experiences from the college level of the game that will be a tremendous help to us as well. This is a great staff to work with and we are excited for the season to get started.”
That excitement goes beyond just the personnel for the baseball program, as Coach Keenan also noted. “Our field has undergone some significant changes; we have a new scoreboard and also a watering system,” he pointed out. “It is in absolutely beautiful condition and we will have one of the nicest looking fields that we play on. We are appreciative of all of the hard work and take pride in being able to play at such a nice facility.”