The UW-River Falls baseball team’s first home games in 23 years will happen a little sooner than expected due to this weekend’s weather forecast.
The team announced Wednesday morning that its home opening doubleheader against UW-Stevens Point has been moved from Saturday, March 29, at 1 p.m. to Friday, March 28, beginning at noon. Games three and four of the weekend series will now take place Saturday at 1 p.m. instead of Sunday.
Friday’s games will mark UWRF’s first baseball home games since the program was suspended in 2002 before being reinstated in June, 2023. Steve Bartlein was hired as Falcon baseball coach in August, 2023. Nearly 18 months later, he finally coached his first game.
Bartlein and the Falcons defeated Nebraska-Wesleyan 14-3 in UWRF’s first game in 23 years Thursday, March 13, in Auburndale, Fla. They went on to win four of their six games down south, before coming back north and splitting a doubleheader with three-time MIAC champion Bethel University Sunday at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.
Bartlein said after 18 months of building the program from scratch, it feels good to finally be playing games.
“It was awesome for a year and a half, recruiting, building a team and training the team,” he said. “So this was really a fun experience to be able to get out there with the adrenaline of a game and the intensity of a game, and also to experience it for the first time with a lot of these guys too.”
Thirty of the 39 players on the Falcon roster are freshmen, while Bartlein is a head coach for the first time after previously serving as an assistant at his alma mater, UW-Whitewater, and Carroll University. Falcon assistants Marty Herum, Brian Giebel, Weston Lombard and Chad Patko are all first-time collegiate coaches, meaning that first win March 13 against Nebraska-Wesleyan was a big deal to a lot of people.
“Man, that was just a really, really exciting day and a fun thing for myself, for our staff, for our players, and for the school,” Bartlein said. “It was nice that we could kind of cross that off the list and move on to continuing to develop as a program and not have to worry about trying to get that first one.”
UWRF averaged 9.7 runs in their six Florida games while allowing four. Every Falcon pitcher was making their collegiate debut, and they came out of the trip with a combined earned run average of 3.84 while posting back-to-back shutouts in a 10-0 win over Clarkson and a 7-0 win over Trinity last Monday and Tuesday.
“That was one of the most exciting pieces of this trip,” Bartlein said. “For a vast, vast majority of this group, this was their first opportunity at college baseball. For many college baseball teams, as they kick off the spring, there’s first chances for guys that maybe didn’t play a lot last year. Or they were role players coming into the year. But for us, these were the first collegiate innings for basically everybody, so that was really a unique thing.”
Sunday the Falcons beat MIAC powerhouse Bethel 3-0 in the first game of their doubleheader at U.S. Bank Stadium before seeing their four game winning streak end with a 6-0 loss in the nightcap.
Freshman JV Castillo doubled in a run and scored on an RBI groundout by sophomore Max Stocco in the second inning of the first game and freshman Patrick Lundgren singled in what proved to be the game winning run in the third, while freshman Kaleb Zabielski picked up his third win of the season on the mound, allowing three hits and one earned run over six innings.
UWRF had just four hits in the nightcap– a double by Castillo and singles by freshman Tanner Hraby, junior Kole Paulsen and freshman Andrew Athmann.
Seven games into the season Castillo leads the Falcons in hitting with an average of .435 while sophomore Max Krebs has driven in a team-high eight runs and has the team’s lone home run– an inside the park grand slam in their 10-0 victory over Clarkson last Monday in Florida. Zabielski is 3-0 on the mound with a 1.69 earned run average in 16 innings pitched.
Bartlein said he’s excited to see continued improvement from the young Falcons.
“I think the challenge that we’re going to experience here in the next couple weeks is, can we continue to prepare and can we continue to bring that level of focus and intensity?” he said. “Because honestly, the easy part was being focused and intense for the first slate of games. Now, can we do that over the next couple weeks? That’s going to be the test.”
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
