With three teams taking the field for baseball this summer, Escalon High varsity baseball coach Greg Largent said it was a good way to see what the players will have to offer.
“The A team was our projected varsity, the B team our projected JV team,” Largent explained. “This summer we tried an incoming freshman team, we got to spend more time with the incoming kids, they were our C team.”
Enjoying the most success was the ‘B’ team, which Largent said played in a couple of tournament championships, while the ‘A’ team won more than they lost.
“They learned a lot, we got some kids some playing time, experimented with some different positions,” Largent explained of the A team. “It’s still a work in progress.”
Reaping the most benefits, though, were members of the ‘C’ team, getting a solid introduction to the sport at the high school level.
“For four straight Mondays, we did a round robin workout from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.,” Largent explained. “It was Escalon, Enochs, Oakdale and Gregori.”
He said the format had the teams matching up against each other for three innings or an hour, whichever came first, and they would offer instruction as they went along.
“There were no umpires, we coached them on the spot,” Largent said. “You would see the guys in a game situation, stop and explain it.”
With the round robin format, each team played each other every Monday and the site also rotated, with each school hosting one of the four Mondays.
“This was something that (coach) Nate Gregory in Oakdale had come up with,” Largent noted. “It really worked out well.”
The coach added that some of those C team players were able to get some playing time in during B games later on in the summer, and they also got introduced to their coaching staff well ahead of the spring 2015 season.