The Williams Bay baseball team will be back on the field this upcoming season after having to cancel the 2022 season altogether due to not having enough student-athletes for the team to compete.
Caleb Edington, the new head baseball coach, is a 2017 graduate of Williams Bay. He played baseball all four years at the Bay before continuing his baseball career at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana, until he graduated in 2021. He previously was an assistant coach on the Bulldogs staff for a couple weeks prior to last season being shut down.
“With not having a season last year and being a former assistant, I obviously wanted to help out again this year,” Eddington said.
Eddington was hired for the head coaching role around the end of February.
He inherits a very young team with around 20 players, and 13 of them are freshmen. While Eddington is fairly young himself and new to being a head coach, he believes having a young team will be beneficial at the very least in the long run for all involved.
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“Since we have so many freshmen and it’s their first year of high school ball, I talk a lot about development and getting them into the game,” he said. “Some of them are going to have to play, and if some of them are starting their freshman year, they’ll probably be starting for four years. They might be 14-15 years old, but there’s spots to be filled. If you put in the work, you’re going to get an opportunity.”
The Bulldogs have only had a few practices so far prior to their opening day game at home against Delavan-Darien on Wednesday, March 29, but from what he has seen from his team, he feels the camaraderie between the guys may be the biggest strength of all.
“It seems like a lot of them are really close friends,” Eddington said. “And with the upperclassmen that we do have, they have been more than willing to step up, help me out and help with the younger kids at practice.”
But Eddington understands there’s going to be quite a few challenges.
“We’re a younger team and I’m younger too with very little coaching experience,” he said. “It’ll probably take a couple games for me and the players to feel everything out. Especially early on, we have a lot of stuff to work on and get used to, but as the season goes on I’m sure we’ll figure it all out.”
As a baseball player, Eddington’s goal was always to win. As a first time head coach of a team that didn’t have a 2022 season, it’s about a lot more than that now, specifically just getting out on the field.
“Winning is a big part of it, but as a coach, it’s about working with the kids and helping them improve on and off the field,” he said. “We’re focusing on improvement more so than we are the outcome of games. As a team, we just want to get out there, play and hopefully win some games. After not being able to play a game last year, we’re just happy to be on the field.”