The University of Idaho baseball club took an important step in their aim to establish themselves on campus last weekend.
The club took on a team from Eastern Washington University and dropped both games of the double header. While losses of 9-8 and 16-7 seem negative on the surface, there are positives for the club team to pull out of this.
“It’s important to get my guys out there and get them experience,” club founder and manager Anthony Strunk said. “It sets the tone for if guys don’t come out and think we’re losing, the morale is going to go down as a team.”
Strunk said that exposure and player participation for the club is as good as he hoped it would be, compared to the last time the club tried to stay as an established organization.
“It’s been way different, a bunch of guys are coming out,” Strunk said. “People see we’re organized, people see we’re playing ball…we just have a good group.”
The on field results haven’t quite come together for the Vandals, also having dropped exhibition games to Montana earlier in the year, though Strunk believes the talent and potential is there heading into the real season which begins in the Spring.
“We have more players, with more players comes more talent,” Strunk said. “Right now it’s just playing well as a team and finding the guys that play well with each other and getting them on the field at the same time.”
The players on Eastern even echoed those sentiments.
“I think they’re doing really good, they’re better than a lot of club teams we’ve played in the past,” Cash Ulrich, manager of Eastern, said.
Asked what he believes the team needs to work on to get to where they need to be, Strunk easily noted consistency.
“It’s definitely a weak point right now. I don’t know what I’m going to get out of them every single inning. Some we look phenomenal, some we can’t do anything right, we’ll work at it in practice,” he said.
The Vandals will continue their fall exhibition schedule when they travel to Bellingham, Wash. to take on the Western Washington club team during the weekend of the 21st. The idea for the club is to keep improving and keep looking forward to the spring.
“Our whole team is pretty much a positive thing,” Strunk said. “I think it will be a fun year.”