Lions improve greatly as the team looks to replace 15 graduated seniors

The West Linn baseball team got its rebuilding process underway this summer, competing with an exceptionally young crop of players and the Lions try and make up for the loss of 15 seniors from last year's squad.

“It was a good think for our up and coming kids because most of them have zero varsity experience and it was an opportunity for them to see what that level looks like,” coach Kevin Mills said.

Not surprisingly, West Linn struggled at times over the summer, particularly early in the season as players made the leap to take on high-quality pitching and hitting.

But the Lions improved tremendously by the time the summer season wrapped up last weekend which Mills said was the ultimate goal for the OIBA season.

“It's a big learning curve and that's what the summer is for. We, as coaches, can sit down and try to get a feel for what we need to focus on heading into next spring,” Mills said.

Ultimately, the Lions will strive for consistency above all else as they will turn over a large portion of the roster next year.

“There were days where we'd look like a completely different team but we really showed a lot of improvement,” Mills said.

Perhaps the biggest leap was made by the team's young pitching staff which, early in the year, struggled with keeping batters off base.

“Once we started throwing strikes and forcing other teams to beat us we really started competing well,” Mills said.

Returning pitcher Matt Fletcher came on strong toward the end of the summer season and should be a key figure on the mound for the Lions next year along with Mitch Gondor and Ben Jacobs, who also made big strides over the summer.

In a busy summer that occasionally saw the team play seven games in a five-day stretch, multiple players put in innings for the Lions.

Offensively, incoming sophomore Carson Lindell was impressive at the plate and should factor into the line-up next spring.

Young third-baseman Blake Herman also had a nice summer along with Braden Vogt who handled a difficult switch from second base to shortstop admirably.

The Lions won just two league games over the summer but were competitive against a very strong field of teams.

“You obviously want to win games but the bigger goal is to improve the program and we had a lot of kids who stepped up for us,” Mills said.