April 22, 2019 at 3:04 p.m.
Double trouble
Condensed GNC baseball schedule set to test Hodags
Double trouble
With most of the first half of the Great Northern Conference season snowed under, the vast majority of the season has been condensed into doubleheaders. Conference commissioner Scott Winch reorganized the schedule on Thursday, making doubleheaders for GNC schools that have not played each other yet this season.
The team most impacted by the change is Rhinelander, which was the only school that had not played a conference game prior to last Thursday. As the schedule resets, beginning with a doubleheader against Northland Pines today at Stafford Field, the Hodags are slated to play 16 games - including all 12 of their GNC contests - over the next 29 days.
It's not quite the same grind as last year, when the Hodags played a 21-game regular season over the span of 28 days, but coach Joe Waksmonski said it will be taxing nonetheless.
"I think fatigue is a factor - not just physical fatigue but mental fatigue," Waksmonski told the River News Thursday, shortly after the doubleheaders were officially established by the conference. "It's a daily grind. Your players are leaving school early to travel to places and then they're gone playing a game for four to five hours, you get home late and you've got to do it over again two days later."
The Hodags started their season April 6 with a doubleheader sweep of Notre Dame Academy in Green Bay. That seems like months ago now.
The Pines doubleheader is the only action scheduled for this week for the Hodags, but things pickup in earnest next week. Rhinelander has back-to-back doubleheaders at Medford and at Lakeland next Tuesday and Thursday, and back-to-back doubleheaders against Mosinee and Antigo the following week, with a non-conference game thrown in against Wausau East May 6 for good measure. All told, Rhinelander is scheduled to play nine games in 10 days during that stretch.
"It's all against quality teams," Waksmonski said. "It's going to be whoever's throwing we get good performances because we can't get into any type of bullpen game whatsoever. Basically, whoever's going to be pitching Tuesday will not be able to pitch Thursday."
Exactly how Waksmonski is going to handle his pitching staff during the stretch remains to be seen. He used four different pitchers in a doubleheader at Notre Dame, but kept three of them under 75 pitches in anticipation of playing a doubleheader against Tomahawk three days later which was eventually postponed due to poor field conditions.
"We haven't really thought about what's going to happen," Waksmonski said. "Between now and that point we might have some more injuries or, hopefully, we'll be able to get some guys back in time that might be banged up a little bit."
The biggest struggle, as the Hodags found out first-hand last spring, will be staying sharp over the course of a condensed schedule. Rhinelander started hot, winning its first nine games of the season, but a loss to Lakeland in the second game of a doubleheader precipitated an eight-game losing skid and the Hodags finished the year only a game above .500 at 12-11.
Waksmonski said the biggest take away from last year's experience is the necessity to adapt on the fly.
"It's all about our energy level and who wants it more on an inning by inning, pitch by pitch basis, keeping our focus," he said. "Once the games start rolling, you really don't have a lot of practice time to correct the mistakes. A lot of our players, and coaches too, will have to make corrections on the fly with very little practice time between games and between doubleheaders."
Rhinelander has only four non-conference games remaining on its schedule, but three of those games are against teams in the same regional grouping as Rhinelander and could be useful for playoff seeding.
"We might have to cancel one, maybe two, games in there," Waksmonski said. "I've actually been getting emails from other coaches trying to add games and I don't know if this will allow us to add any more games. More or less, we just have to get our conference season in and if we get one or two non-conference games in, that would be great, but our main focus right now is our conference season."
That conference season begins today and will be fit into a tight window - just as it was for the Hodags both last year and back in 2013.
"It's not advantageous for us to have our conference season scheduled this way, but that's what Mother Nature threw at us this spring and that's what we have to play out," Waksmonski said.
Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].
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