Mercer’s baseball team has been practicing six days a week since January 15 in preparation for the start of the 2020 season.
Head coach Fred Carella returns for his second year as head coach of the Vikings.
Carella was an assistant coach for 15 years with Mercer, starting in 2003, before taking the helm in September 2018. The Vikings finished last season with a 36-16 record.
“The expectation this year is to win the region, to advance to the super regionals, and this is the expectation every year,” Carella said.
The baseball team has been successful throughout the years and is nationally recognized, according to Athletic Director John Simone.
Freshmen Justin Fogel, a catcher, says that “We have a really strong chance [of winning the regionals] because we’re really young and energetic and our pitching will help us out.”
The current team skews to the younger side, with 21 of the 33 players on the roster freshman.
“Hopefully they get a good start and get confidence because confidence has a lot to do with it,” Simone, a former baseball coach himself, said. “Once you get that confidence, you tend to be more resilient and persevere through some tough times so it should be interesting.”
Freshman Jake Kmiec, an outfielder says, “I’m very confident, we have the pitching to go far, we have the hitting, we have the fielding, once we put it all together there’s definitely no stopping us.”
