The Wellsville-Middletown baseball team got back on the winning track last spring as it finished with a 9-9 record after winning just two games the year before.

This spring, the Tigers will look to continue their winning ways as they bring back nine players from 2023. Seniors AJ Sherwood and Tristan Hill, juniors Brennan Cash, Haskell Davis, Justin Beabout, Wyatt Moore and Gage Marshall and sophomores Logan Davis and Isaac Todd are the returning players.

So far, W-M is off to a slow start as it lost its first two games to Community R-6 and Clopton by a combined total of 33-0. The Tigers fell 18-0 to Clopton in three innings under cold and rainy conditions in their home opener on March 22.

Even though W-M has a large group of returning players, it also has several players who are participating in baseball at the high school level for the first time. The Tigers have seven freshmen on their team.

“We’re asking younger kids to do a lot of things that they’re not ready for just yet, but we work as a group and we drill a lot,” second-year W-M coach Alex Thull said. “Everything has to become more rudimentary with this group to make sure that we can build a base. I have only one freshman who has played baseball consistently since he was a child, so a lot of these kids are coming with very little playing experience, which sometimes it’s nice because a lot of them are super coachable.”

W-M has to find a way to replace a talented senior class it had last year. The Tigers lost six players to graduation, including all-EMO selections Dylan Alsop, Mason Guzy and CJ Curd.

“That’s kind of where we’re at here in Wellsville,” Thull said. “We just don’t have a lot of involvement in the senior class. We graduated a ton of seniors in every sport last year.”

Gage Nichols is the only freshman on the team with plenty of baseball experience. Thull said he is impressed with Nichols’ effort after the first week of the season.

“He has quite a bit of playing time,” Thull said. “He played shortstop and second. Against Clopton, he played left field. He’s kind of our utility player. He can play almost every position in the field. His batting is where he needs to keep getting better.”

Junior Cooper Henderson, who earned all-Eastern Missouri Conference honors in basketball this winter, is playing baseball for the first time.

Last year, the Tigers got off to a 6-2 start before losing seven of their next 10 games. They won four games in conference play.

W-M was scheduled to play road games against Louisiana and New Haven on March 25 and 26, respectively. The Tigers will travel to Van-Far on March 29.