After a one-year hiatus, Liberty Christian is back on the baseball diamond. 

The Eagles were able to fill their baseball roster to field a baseball team one year after the Eagles did not have enough players to field a team. There is excitement that the Eagles were able to field a team among the whole team, but especially among the three seniors who get to finish their high school athletic careers on the baseball diamond.

“We have three seniors on the team. And they’re excited,” Liberty Christian baseball coach Bill Coovert said. “They didn’t think they’d be able to play baseball their senior year. Now, here they are. There’s a lot of excitement from the seniors for sure.”

This year’s squad has 13 players on the roster. They roster includes three seniors and a strong number of underclassmen.  Coovert thinks this year will be a rebuilding year since the school was not able to field a team last season. He said they were making great progress in the first week of practice. 

“We’ve seen great improvements already this year,” Coovert said. “What started out as are we going to have enough is now turned into this team’s coming together. Every practice, there’s improvement.”

Coovert said the Eagles’ focus early on in practice was finding a solid group of pitchers and working on hitting. Based on what he saw in the first couple weeks of practice, Coovert thinks the Eagles will have four or five pitchers to form a solid rotation. A majority of the Eagles’ practice time has been focused on hitting. 

“You can’t win a game if you don’t put some runs on the board,” Coovert said. “For us, we’ve really been focusing a lot on our hitting and making good contact. Spending a lot of time with their form. Hitting is key for me. If you score runs, you can make up for some errors in the field.” 

With the makeup of the roster, Coovert anticipates the Eagles will play a lot of small ball. They are not a power team, he stressed. They have a couple players capable of hitting the ball long but do not have that skill set up and down their lineup. For the most part, they will focus on base hits. 

“We have a couple of folks that are capable of hitting the ball long but we don’t necessarily have that up and down the lineup,” Coovert said. “So the strategy for us is staggering those individuals that we know are going to get on base and have the folks coming up behind that’s going to clean that up.”

Coovert noted Liberty Christian has a history of doing well at their conference tournament and at the national tournament. While the players know this will be a growing year for the Eagles, Coovert would like to see the Eagles finish with a .500 record this season. He also hopes to see the Eagles do well at the Metro Athletic Conference tournament and at the state tournament.