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    Baseball: Astros heading to sixth straight state tournament

    By Ryan Blank,

    21 hours ago

    https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0o6viX_0uidX48Y00

    HAZEN, N.D. — The Hazen Astros have dominated the Class B legion baseball season, owning a 25-6 record and winning the District 1 championship a week ago. Now, their focus is on the Class B state tournament starting this weekend.

    For this Astros team, it isn’t the intangibles, like hitting or pitching, that stand out. Hazen’s mentality and demeanor on the diamond is what makes them who they are. No matter the situation in the game, winning or losing, the Astros are having a good time playing the sport they love.

    “This team’s strength is the demeanor that they have,” head coach Nate Leintz says. “They always are just cool, calm, and collected. There’s been games this year when we’ve been down three or four runs and they understand that the game is seven innings and they continue to play and they understand that they can’t get down on themselves and their expectation is to always battle back and do what we can in order to have success and win ballgames.”

    “Honestly, when we’re out on the field, we’re having fun, we’re cracking jokes, the other bases are loaded with zero outs or we got two outs and you know, we’re one out away from going to the state tournament,” infielder Kade Goebel says. “We’re always having fun, we’re always laughing, always joking, and we’re always playing with a with a low stress mentality. I think that’s key to our success we’ve been over the years.”

    When Hazen takes the field at this week’s state tournament in LaMoure, it will be the Astros sixth straight appearance at state. A key for this team is their experience with every player on the roster having played on the biggest stage before.

    “Everyone on the team has been to a state tournament, has state experience,” Goebel says. “So, we kind of know what to expect and we just got to play our game. We’ve taken third before and we’ve taken dead last, so we’ve kind of been on the spectrum of every place you can finish except be the state champion. So, that’s one of our main goals as a team. We’ve been close but not close enough.”

    “Experience is huge at this level,” Leintz adds. “I mean, guys have played in big games and I’ve told the guys this whole season going into it as another baseball game, another baseball tournament against an opponent that we know obviously is going to be tough because they’re there for a reason as well. So, I think it’ll be important for us to lean on that experience and not get too high or too low at any point and just play the best that we can.”

    Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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