As the snow covering the baseball diamond starts to melt and spring sports teams begin their workouts, the baseball team is already in shape and ready for its first game. After a 12 win, 9 loss season last year, the team hopes to hit the field this year in the best form possible.

“We started our off-season training about a week after last year’s season ended,” senior Matt Supko said. “We went all through the summer and fall and continued to workout during winter.”

The purpose of the workouts is to keep the players in shape and make sure they are ready for anything the season puts in front of them. They work to get stronger and improve the basic skills before in-season training starts.

“During the off-season, we spend a majority of our time lifting and conditioning before we even pick up a bat or ball,” Supko said. “That’s mainly for injury prevention purposes so that our muscles are used to the kind of force we put on them during baseball-related work.”

The first baseball game of the season is a scrimmage scheduled for Saturday, March 7 against James Madison High School; by then the team will have been training together for about nine months.

“I love that we get to start baseball season fairly early in the year, but it seems that we always run into weather at the beginning of the year,” senior Nick Neville said. “We won’t even be on our field until a week or two before the first game.”

Most spring sports started the season on Feb. 23. Teams will be training hard for the next few weeks just to be prepared for their first games. In addition to the physical benefits of the early-training regime, the team also feels there were benefits to being able to practice as a team for such a long time before the season began.

“I think the fact that we were able to be together as a team really helped us develop and build chemistry,” Neville said.

Hopefully, the team gained as much strength as possible during the off-season to allow it to begin the 2015 season with a win.