With the 2026 Spring coming up, the Rochester baseball players are coaches are itching to get back onto the field. We are closing in on a little more than a month away from the first game against Hillsboro on March 16th. One negative effect the team is experiencing right now, is that there is no gym space in the afternoon for the team to go in there and have open gyms. Open gyms are essentially an optional practice that is about an hour or a little longer that basically gets the team chemistry up and do some more basic drills. With Boys Basketball and Girls Basketball, there are only a few days out of the month where the baseball team is allowed to have an open gym, which is essentially useless. Although, if the players are wanting to get better and play on varsity, they should be training, weight lifting, and doing some kind of conditioning to get ready for the season. I interviewed Jorey Myren, a Rochester Baseball player, on how the season would go in his eyes. “I think we are going to be great, we have a bunch of hardworking kids and we had a good season last year and we were young.” Jorey also has a wrist injury he suffered during football season, which is preventing him from playing baseball, let alone training. I asked him how it hurts his senior season and how it effects him, “Obviously everything I do is very limited, I’m about to play my senior year, and I haven’t even swung a bat yet. Not the greatest feeling but we’ll be back.”
Baseball is looking to win a regional championship this year, considering the past 2 years have resulted in a loss during the Regional Championship. The 2024 season was a disappointing loss to Jacksonville, and the whole team was shocked. Last year we played a very good Mt. Zion team, and lost big time. The team also split the conference with Normal U-High. We were one win away from winning the conference outright this year, but ultimately resulted in a loss to Chatham, which meant we would split with U-High. It has been a while since Rochester Baseball has been up top the conference leaderboard and let alone, 1st place. It was nice to get that experience to be on a good team and know we will come back next year stronger.
