Jul. 29—WINNER, S.D. — All around the Winner/Colome Legion baseball team, there’s a sense of balance with the current roster.
The depth of the team has proven vital on the run to the Class B state Legion baseball tournament.
Winner/Colome enters the centennial tournament in Milbank with a 15-2 record and the best season winning percentage of the eight qualifying teams at .882. Victors of the Region 7B Legion tournament, the team is the winner of five consecutive games dating back to July 16, allowing only five total runs in that span.
As head coach Shane Phillips explained, the key to the Royals’ success lies in the players not stepping away from big spots, trusting themselves to pull through.
“We just kind of stay within ourselves and play our own game,” Phillips said, “And I’ve been telling them that all year if we play our own game, we’re a hard team to beat because we have a really good defense and a really good pitching staff.”
Winner/Colome’s pitching staff has a 1.36 earned-run average in 103 innings of work, tossing six shutouts while only allowing more than three runs in a game five times this season. At the plate, the team sports a .341 batting average, with eight players batting .300 or better, while averaging 8.9 runs per game.
However, in contrast to the spring, where the Winner/Colome high school baseball team began the year 15-0 and made it to the semifinals of the Class B high school tournament, the summer Legion squad’s mentality was put to the test following a 9-2 loss to Wagner Post 11 in the season opener, knowing what was ahead the rest of the year.
“After that game, I told the boys, ‘This is what it’s going to be like. You’re going to get aces all year long,'” Phillips said. “Everybody’s looking at their schedule and they’re setting their schedule to you because they know you’re good and they’re going to be coming after you.”
The hitting core stepped up in big ways following the game, coming through in games where the pitching and defense struggled to record 21 outs, getting contributions from a variety of players.
Program transplants Gavin Risse, who played for Bennett County in the spring, and Isaiah Olson, from Mount Vernon, rank first and fourth on the team in runs batted in and are the top two on the roster with .415 and .407 batting averages, respectively. Winner/Colome veterans Landon Calhoon and Ryder Halligan are second with 18 runs scored to Aiden Schroeder (19), while Halligan and Schroeder have combined for 29 stolen bases.
While having strong depth across the roster presents a good problem for Phillips when setting a lineup, the Royals will lean on the players with previous playoff experience to help execute the plan going into the Legion tournament, knowing how they’ve moved forward to give the team a chance to vie for a championship.
“They’ve pushed throughout the season to get better within themselves,” Phillips said. “They’ve contributed a lot throughout their baseball careers and are just ballplayers, every one of them. They’ve been doing this all together.”
Winner/Colome opens the double-elimination tournament in the evening session against Groton at 5 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 1, in Milbank.