Sports
Unfinished business heads BHS’s agenda
Matthew Semisch
03/31/2015
Bottineau High’s baseball team had a successful 2014 season, but the Braves finished one step short of where they wanted to end up.
The good news was that BHS was playing its best baseball at the right time: The postseason. Bottineau finished the regular season in the middle of the Region V pack but won a region tournament play-in game against North Star (Cando-Bisbee-Egeland) and advanced to the region tourney finals in Harvey.
Harvey-Wells County (H-WC) was favored to win the region and advance to the state tournament. The Hornets did so and defeated Bottineau twice in the process, first in a first-round game and again in the region tournament final.
This left the Braves with a final 2014 record of 15-7. That’s certainly respectable, but Bottineau’s players felt as though they’d left a state tournament berth on the table.
This year, the Braves are determined to get over that hump.
“Obviously, even with the expectations for us being what they usually are, the goal for us is to make the state tournament,” said junior shortstop and pitcher Parker Engelhard.
“Once you get there, anything can happen, and I like our team and our coaching staff and I think we have what it is going to take to get there.”
Reaching this year’s state tournament in Mandan could be a tall order for the Braves, though. At the end of last season, the Braves lost four seniors, including starting pitcher Lee Schneider, first baseman Garrett Lynnes and All-Region catcher Andrew Hill.
The cupboard for this year is far from bare, but Bottineau is only carrying two seniors. Shortstop and pitcher Luke Amsbaugh and outfielder Jesse Heil are the only 12th-graders on the 2015 roster.
This year’s Braves bunch will be relatively short on senior leadership as there’s only two of them. Even still, though, head coach Zach Keller likes what’s coming back this season.
“We lost some good seniors in Lee and Anthony and Garrett,” Keller said, “but we get a lot of our kids back this year and we’ve got four pretty solid arms on the mound.
“We’ll have four good arms up there, and we have to replace a really good catcher in Andrew Hill, but Casey Tooke will do well back there and Brody Moum will catch a bit, too.”
Bottineau’s rotation of starting pitchers will be made up of one senior in Luke Amsbaugh, two juniors in Engelhard and Moum and a sophomore in Austin Kittleson. Another sophomore, starting catcher Tooke, could also see time on the mound.
Moum is expected to start the Braves’ season-opener this Thursday at Washburn/Wilton/Center-Scranton. That game is set to start at 4 p.m. in Washburn.
Bottineau then hosts Region V rival Rugby next Thursday at the Lumberyard. That will be the first of three games in as many days, as the Braves will face Midkota and Thompson on Friday and Saturday, respectively, in a tournament hosted by Shiloh Christian.
The Braves have largely been confined to practicing in the BHS gym thus far. Not much tinkering has been made to the lineup with Bottineau working on the hardwood, but Keller said he is pleased with what he’s seen from his team thus far.
“So far, practice has been pretty good,” he said. “Thirteen high school kids came out for baseball this year and seven junior-highers, but the main thing right now is that we have a couple of positions to solidify yet and will look to the freshmen and sophomores and see who wants to take them, and we’ll figure that out early on here.
“We have a non-region game to start the season, then a region game, then a tournament,” Keller continued, “and that’s where we’ll experiment with stuff and see what we’ve got before the bulk of our region play.”
One of the positions Keller is still looking at is second base. Keller said that Tooke and projected starting second-baseman Dylan Block could switch positions if need be.
As for the Braves region, Keller sees it as being more wide-open this year than usual.
“Region-wise, Harvey won it last year but I think it’s pretty open this time around,” he said. “Harvey lost two of their better pitchers and one of them was also a catcher and first-baseman, but we had that problem, too when we lost Lee and Lynnes.
“Between us, Harvey, Northern Lights (Rolla-Rolette-St. John-Wolford), Rugby, it’s pretty wide-open. North Star is pretty young and you never know what to expect from Dunseith, but those first four are probably the front-runners and I think we’re up there.”
“Up there” might not be quite enough to get to state, but there’s a sense of optimism in the Braves’ camp.
“I think that’s definitely the team’s goal this year, to get to state,” Moum said. “We’re still a pretty young team this year and we only have the two seniors, but I like what we have, and the future looks good, too.”