Hit after hit after hit. The crack of bats in the batting cage signifies the start of baseball season. This year, the Pinewood baseball team faces much change with the addition of Head Coach Matt Keelan and several new players, some of whom are completely new to the sport.
The three captains, seniors Alakh Kapadia and Jamie Burton and junior Bill Cui, said they are excited about the new season and look forward to playing with the team’s latest additions.
“One of our biggest goals this season is getting the guys who haven’t played a lot of baseball used to the game and getting them to have fun,” Kapadia said.
Along with the new players, the team is excited about the new coaching staff. Keelan, the new head coach of the team, was the former Woodside Priory junior varsity baseball coach. While his coaching style is very different from Pinewood’s previous coach, the players are optimistic that this change will lead them to victory in the coming season.
“He’s very technical,” Cui said. “He films our throwing motions and our body stances and works on them with us in practice. The practices are very serious, and I think that this culture shift is good for us to try and win some more games.”
Beyond merely winning games, some of the team’s favorite memories have come from the little moments and joys that are often overlooked when playing a team sport.
“My favorite memories on the team have been in practices and warmups where everybody is laughing and having fun,” Alan Skelley, a junior in his third year of playing baseball for Pinewood, said.
For others, like Kapadia and Jayanth Ananth, a junior who has played baseball for three years, their favorite moments are concentrated within a single game—senior night against Thomas Moore in 2023.
“Pinewood baseball, at its core, is about the guys coming out, laying out for some balls in the outfield, hitting some home runs now and then, and everybody in the dugout getting louder than you’ve ever seen,” Kapadia said.“It’s about fellas screaming at the top of their lungs for the program.”
