North Penn baseball thrives on Tennessee trip

Regardless of how this last game ended, the North Penn baseball team was going to make the 12-hour trek back to Pennsylvania happy.

But designated hitter Jake Schuster wasn’t going to settle for just that, so he put a really big exclamation mark on the Knights’ trip to Tennessee. Schuster cracked a walk-off grand slam to give North Penn a 3-1 record in the Ooltewah (Tenn.) Invitational to start off the 2016 season.

The defending state champions, the Knights are trying to replace a number of key cogs and it’s a small sample size, but this team looks like it’s going to come together well.

“Overall we’re very pleased with the way we started out,” Knights coach Kevin Manero said. “We played pretty good defense the whole time, we certainly swung the bats real well and we did some good things on the mound as well. We know the competition once we get back up here in our conference is going to be very good, but we’ve done everything we can do to keep us getting better every time we go to the field.”

With the Easter holiday, and the school’s spring break falling on the first week of the spring season, there were only so many options for North Penn to find games in the area to start the campaign. Planning ahead, Manero started looking for a tournament to play in.

North Penn’s first target, an event in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was full but as the fifth-year head coach kept digging, a message board led him to Tennessee. A couple of phone calls later and the Knights were in.

The Knights left at 5:45 am on Wednesday and got back at 5:45 pm on Sunday. It was a 12-hour bus ride each way, but the time together only helped strengthen team chemistry, vital for a club trying to replace 15 graduated seniors from last year, including the entire infield and much of the pitching staff.

“It helped because we were able to 100 percent focus on the things we needed to do, which we try to do anyway,” Manero said. “We expected these teams to be good and they were definitely good. Many of them are already 10 games into the schedule; they’re a good three weeks ahead of us. It was very good competition and we knew that, but we were able to go in and really spend a lot of energy on the things we were doing.”

North Penn took 28 players, including a few extra arms given the high amount of innings so early in the season. Though it took place over break, the trip was not a vacation and the players certainly approached it as a business trip.

If the Knights weren’t playing, they were practicing, except for Friday. Rains cancelled the games that day so the Knights improvised, going on a team bowling trip as Manero put it, “throwing a few strikes of a different kind,” and also managed to catch Villanova’s two wins over the weekend.

The extra arms certainly paid off, as freshman AJ Patterson spun a seven inning one-hit shutout in the finale. There’s work to do yet, but the new pitching staff made some positive strides forward.

“We need to do a little better job of repeating good strikes and a little better job cutting our pitch count down but that’s to be expected,” Manero said. “The guys went out there and realized when they weren’t doing that, what they need to work on moving forward. Once the league starts, we’re only going to play a couple games a week, so we’re not going to get all these arms innings regularly and this got a lot of guys a chance to get out there and kick a little of the rust off.”

The staff is new, but the guy they trust the most is not. Junior Matt Marino is back behind the plate, now an elder statesman after taking over the catcher’s role last year. The Knights coaches want this pitching staff to be strong for the next few years but also develop quickly this season.

Along with Marino, the team’s leaders like outfielders Mason Nadeau, Alex Peterson and infielder Kadar Namey along with Schuster showed the younger guys the right way to go about things.

In Saturday’s twinbill, North Penn started with a 16-6 win over Soddy Daisy (Tenn.) then dropped a 13-8 game with Bearden (Tenn.). Saturday saw a 13-3 win over host Ooltewah, then the 4-0 walk-off win over Jefferson County (Tenn.).

The last game was quite similar to what Manero is expecting in the SOL Continental, a close, grind-it out kind of game that easily could have gone either way. Schuster, another guy who will need to increase his impact on the team, settled it by attacking a first-pitch fastball for the grand slam winner.

“He took a lot of at-bats away from himself by getting in there and not swinging the bat,” Manero said. “This weekend and the end of last season too, he’s just a lot more confident and aggressive. The one thing Jake does a very good job of is he hits the ball hard to the middle part of the park. We know his swing is where we need it to be.”

There’s a long way to go for North Penn, but the Knights return home with four games, three wins and a lot of good to build on. Leaving on a walk-off slam only adds a little more to it.

“It was a cool way to end the tournament, it was a very-well pitched game and a very well-played defensive game,” Manero said. “It was good to be able to dig deep late in the game, get a couple baserunners and put one big swing on the ball. It was one of those kind of wins where you had to grind it out and gut it out.

“One of the things we’ve told our guys is, hitting is going to go up and down. If the pitching and defense can maintain a certain level, you’re going to have a lot of chances to win those games late and that’s what we did.”