The Frankfort baseball team officially started practice and is preparing for the start of the season.
“I think we’ve had a really good preseason,” head coach Andy Dudley said. “Last year we had a really young team. We had a lot of guys who had been on the varsity roster but didn’t have a lot of varsity playing experience outside of three or four guys.”
Last season, the Hot Dogs finished 12-16 after starting the season with a doubleheader sweep of West Lafayette and wins against Clinton Prairie and Rossville.
Frankfort is two years removed from a semi-state run that saw them win a sectional championship over Western and a regional championship over Mishawaka Marian.
The offseason and preseason have looked different over the past couple of seasons due to some rule changes from the IHSAA.
“Offseason is a lot of individual development,” Dudley said. “Just in the past couple of years, the IHSAA has made some changes; we’ve always been allowed to do conditioning, but in the past, that’s not included throwing. If you’ve been around baseball, the most important conditioning you can do is getting out to throw. The real advantage of that is that guys’ arms are already in shape when we’re ready to roll.”
With any new year comes changes to the roster and coaching staff. This year, Dudley brought in former player Jayden Skinner to coach the junior varsity team and moved Cormac Jewell to a full-time varsity assistant.
“Coach Jewell is a tremendous asset for us,” Dudley said. “He’s got college baseball experience and is really just a good guy and understands our mission and our program. He knows what our expectations are and has done a great job developing our young guys. Jayden was available; he’s working (at Frankfort) full-time, and he’s gonna step in. Jayden has been a part of some great successes with this team, and he knows what we’re about. I really like having former players on the coaching staff because they know how we do things and they know the expectations.”
Skinner was a part of the regional championship team in 2023.
The team’s mentality has always been to “control what you can control”. That’s the message Dudley is communicating to the team as they lay out their goals for the year. ”
“Do we want to win a sectional? Of course, we want to win a sectional,” Dudley said. “But the only thing we can do is worry about the moment. Our number one thing is focusing on what we have control over. In the fall, when the new sectional alignments came out, I spoke with coaches that we’re worried about who was in their sectional, but we can’t do anything about that, we can’t control that, we can only control right now.”
The Hot Dogs will once again start the season with West Lafayette, Rossville and Clinton Prairie. The season opener is at West Lafayette on April 5.