Waukon baseball team plays to 2-12 record during abbreviated 2020 season

The 2020 Iowa high school baseball season was anything but normal with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic abbreviating this season’s competition schedule and all but eliminating any pre-season preparation. Like most high school teams, however, the Waukon baseball squad made the most of its opportunity to play the game, and even though the end result was a 2-12 season record, second-year head coach Shane Schellsmidt said he saw so much to be proud of in how his team handled all the challenges that this season provided.

“The overall impact of COVID-19 was perhaps more about life lessons than on-field impact,” Coach Schellsmidt explained. “The shortened schedule, social distancing and hygiene efforts were temporary changes. Dealing with adversity and accepting changes that were not always desirable are the skills that this group will take forward with them into their adult lives.”

This season’s 2-12 overall mark included a 2-10 effort in Northeast Iowa Conference (NEIC) play that placed the baseball Tribe in sixth place in the final NEIC standings, just ahead of one of their league victims, an Oelwein team with a single NEIC win, with the other Indian victory coming in another NEIC split that produced a 14-4 Tribe triumph at Decorah. Even though that win over Decorah snapped a four-year losing streak to the Vikings and came in convincing fashion, Coach Schellsmidt still points to the fact that his team was even able to take to the field this season and learn from that experience as its most considerable accomplishment.

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