When the New Hope High School baseball team took the field Jan. 25 for its first official practice of the year, it was “rough,” senior Jeremiah Jethroe said.
The Trojans had just returned to school for the spring semester, and none of them had been on the field for quite a while. Simply put, New Hope was rusty.
But by a week later, Jethroe said, the Trojans were back in the swing of things.
“We’re just looking forward to competing,” he said. “It was tough at first, but we learned how to work with it.”
To succeed in 2021, New Hope will need more where that came from. After losing eight senior starters from last season, the Trojans will be adapting all season like they did from their first week of practice to their second.
“I feel like we’ve got some talented kids and some kids that can play, but we don’t really have anybody with any varsity experience,” New Hope coach Lee Boyd said.
New Hope graduated Ryan Burt, Presley Hall, Drew Brown, Cole Ruffin, Hays Lumsden, Cooper Odom, Stallone Shelton, David Young and Jacob Wilson from last year’s team.
Senior Zac Butler and junior Gates Gerhart are perhaps the only Trojans to receive any significant playing time in 2020 who return this spring. Butler started all eight of New Hope’s games last year before the COVID-19 pandemic, playing catcher and designated hitter; Gates Gerhart started four or five games in center field.
This year, Butler will man shortstop for the Trojans while Gerhart again holds down center. Junior Adam Adair is likely to be New Hope’s starting left fielder with Richard Guy slotted into right for now.
Boyd said Jethroe and junior Brant Smith will compete to start at first base, seniors Andrew Chism and Logan Winstead will battle it out at second, junior Hunter Carr will be the presumptive starting catcher, and sophomore Sam Malone will play third.
Jethroe said that the ongoing position battles help motivate the Trojans to practice and play well rather than get complacent.
“With all those seniors gone, really none of us can sit back and say, ‘Oh, yeah, I have a for sure starting spot,'” Jethroe said. “We all know we have to work for a starting spot. Nothing’s guaranteed for basically any of us.”
Butler, Gerhart, Smith and Malone will begin the year as the principal pitchers for New Hope. Junior Dawson Lofton, who threw around 15 innings for the Trojans in 2020, is out for roughly a month with an arm injury. He hasn’t thrown in more than a month and was scheduled to begin a throwing program this week before it was delayed by inclement weather.
“We just don’t have a whole lot of proven guys,” Boyd said, “but I feel like we’ve got some guys who can play and compete with them.”
New Hope was slated to begin finding that out Tuesday on the road at Starkville, but the game was canceled because of the ice and snow that blanketed fields across much of the nation. Saturday’s game at Gordo (Alabama) has also been wiped out, meaning the Trojans won’t get on the field until Feb. 23 at East Webster at the earliest.
New Hope hasn’t practiced this week, either, a difficult hurdle to clear in a sport that depends so heavily on repetition — particularly for the Trojans’ hurlers.
“It’s been five days without touching a baseball,” Boyd said. “That’s going to be tough for our pitching.”
This week’s winter storm is just another setback for a team that missed most of its 2020 season because of COVID-19 and played limited summer baseball. Boyd said he’s used to having his older, more experienced players pass on lessons to his younger ones, but now, nearly everybody falls into the latter group. While he’s no stranger to roster overturn — it’s part of high school baseball — 2021 brings more than usual.
“This year, I’ll probably have to do more teaching than I have in the past eight or nine years,” Boyd said.
Still, New Hope’s players are excited to get back on the field. Games against the Wolverines, Tuscaloosa (Ala.) Northridge (April 3) and Tupelo (April 26) highlight a tough non-district schedule, and a home-and-home series with Caledonia March 2 and 4 is always significant.
“Those rival games, those are what make high school baseball so fun,” Jethroe said.
New Hope has a good chance at competing in Region 2-5A, which comprises the Trojans, Columbus, West Point, and Grenada. But Boyd knows it won’t be easy for the team, which won the MHSAA Class 4A championship in 2019 before moving up to Class 5A, to get back to the top level with its inexperienced roster. He said that while it might sound like coachspeak, he just wants the Trojans to play as hard as they can.
Jethroe promised the same for when New Hope returns to the field.
“We’re going to work our absolute hardest to be the best team we can be,” he said.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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