Colorado Mesa University (CMU) baseball has one goal in mind for this season and that is a national championship.
The team is coming off of a 14-4 season after COVID-19 shut the season down early for all spring sports.
“In our minds, we’re kind of combining the two and just continuing on, it’s all that we have all the same players. So we feel like we’re 14 and four to start the year. That’s how we’re viewing it,” Head Coach, Chris Hanks said.
The Mavericks come into this season with a very deep roster on both the pitching and hitting side of things. With the NCAA allowing seniors to come back for another year and the addition of the freshman class, the team now has a roster of 49 instead of being closer to 40.
Senior right-handed pitcher Trevin Reynolds knew that he wanted to come back and get the opportunity to compete at the World Series in Cary, N.C and win the first national baseball title for CMU.
“What went through my mind was 2019. I was the starting pitcher for the final game, and we lost that game. I don’t think it’s totally valid to say whose fault it was, but they were my runs. So that kind of left a sour taste in my mouth. Having all those guys come back, it’s like, we’re so close. We just need to go and be the first team in school history to do it. That’d be something,” Reynolds said.
Other than having Reynolds return, the team also has another ace return in sophomore right-handed pitcher Andrew Morris. Morris last season had 33 strikeouts and an Earned Run Average(ERA) of 4.50 only over five appearances.
Morris took advantage of the time off of baseball this summer to really focus on his mechanics and making sure he was doing all the small things correctly.
“I have a good idea of what I want my mechanics to be. And I feel like I’ve really simplified them and taken out the extra parts that I didn’t need that were slowing me down,” Morris said.
In the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference (RMAC), the Mavericks have won the division tournament for the past eight years. With a shortened schedule this season they will see more in conference games then they ever have.
“We have a tradition of winning in the RMAC, and our head coach knows how to win. We don’t take the mentality that we own the RMAC we just know that to beat us, you’re gonna have to be 10 times better than us on that day, you’re gonna have to play your best game to beat us,” junior first baseman Jordan Stubbings said.
The team has not taken the field together in over a year, so they really used the Fall to get back into the swing of things by having intrasquad scrimmages to get back into the mindset of seeing live hitting and pitching.
“We have enough players to create three lineups, three different lineups. We played round robin and had tournaments on the weekend and the two best teams through the weekend got to play a little extra and we did some things like that,” Hanks said.
Power hitting catchers sophomore Haydn McGeary and junior Spencer Bramwell both return to the Maverick lineup after both having a massive impact in both 2019 and 2020.
COVID-19 is something that every athletic team is having to battle, but for CMU baseball, they believe that whoever handles COVID the best will be the team to beat.
“Baseball players are some of the funniest goofiest guys you’ll ever meet in your life and to wear a mask on their faces, it’s really weird for them. And it’s weird for all of us. We can’t even have more than five people in our locker room,” Stubbings said.
The Mavericks begin their season on Feb. 25 at 3 pm against Northwest Nazarene at Suplizio Field in Grand Junction Colo.
