Husker baseball facing expectations by focusing on getting better each day
Expectations are high for Nebraska baseball.
Husker baseball won the 2021 Big Ten championship, the second in program history. Now their name ranks among the top 31 of three preseason polls. D1Baseball.com has projected Nebraska to win the Big Ten again in 2022 and host a regional.
While the outside world is expecting Husker baseball to continue on their dominate path in the Big Ten. The team itself, while aiming high, is focusing on winning each day.
“I'm literally just focused on winning today,” Head Coach Will Bolt said on the first day of practice for the 2022 season. “That's the point we're trying to get to is we're as excited about this day as we are day No. 11 of practice when we're all ready to go play somebody else.”
Bolt’s team is ranked No. 20 by Baseball America, No. 22 by Perfect Game and No. 31 by College Baseball Newspaper (CBN). USA Today and NCBWA’s poll have yet to be released.
He said he talked to his team initially about the expectations and rankings but they don’t talk about it much now.
“We don't really talk about a whole lot of things that we can't control, good or bad,” Bolt said. “I know a lot was made of last year's team, not picked very high and maybe use that as motivation.”
Last season, the Huskers were placed in top-seeded Arkansas’s regional where they won their way to the regional finals and lost to the Razorbacks 2-1 in the series. Many felt Nebraska deserved to host their own regional and disagreed with them being placed in Arkansas’s.
The 2021 squad embraced the underdog mentality, battled to win the Big Ten and made it to the regional final.
Bolt said this team has a different set of circumstances because they are ranked in the preseason and have more expectations surrounding the program.
Individual players on Nebraska’s squad have eyes on them to perform even better than the previous season and have preseason awards and projections next to their names.
Third baseman Max Anderson is D1Baseball.com’s Preseason Player of the Year. Anderson, shortshop Brice Mathews and pitcher Emmett Olsen are ranked within the top 10 of the top prospects in the 2023 MLB draft.
But still, Anderson has his eyes on what he can do now.
“It's tough not to look ahead to that regional and what we did last year,” Anderson, a sophomore, said. “But what we got to do is just focus on the next game.”
Pitcher Shay Schanaman is ranked No. 21 in the top prospects for the 2022 MLB draft by D1baseball and is competing for the starting Friday spot. Schanaman echoes what his coach said about focusing on one day at a time.
“We're not going to make a regional opening weekend but we can stack them together from the start,” the senior said. “That starts in the offseason.”
Schanaman said his team didn’t have a problem carrying the momentum from last season into the off-season and to the first day of practice on Friday.
“It's easy to bring the momentum into the offseason and to work hard when you know that's the goal and that's what we want to do and we've experienced that,” he said. “So once we get a taste of that, it's easy to use that as motivation.”
Schanaman said once he’s gotten a taste of success, it’s hard not to look forward to the next championship or regional but he is trying to be present in the moment and focus on the task, practice and game at hand.
With expectations lingering, Bolt wants his team to be even-keel.
“You're never as good as you think you are, you're never as bad as you think you are,” Bolt said. “So we got to be in the middle all the time. Just be as good as we possibly can be today and tomorrow and then do it again the next day.”
Just as Schanaman said, if you stack good days on one another, good things happen.
“If you find yourself in some big games, you don't try to rise to the occasion if that's the case,” Bolt said. “So just try to block out the outside noise by having your blinders on and working hard in the moment. Easier said than done but the good teams, the great teams can do it.”