Underdog Bertha-Hewitt/Verndale Looks To Stay Hot At State Baseball Tournament

(KDLM) – The Bertha-Hewitt/Verndale Raiders only won six games in the 2022 regular season and ended their campaign on a nine-game losing streak. But none of that matters anymore after going 5-1 in the Section 5A tournament and claiming their first section title since 2006

“We play in a pretty tough conference,” said BHV head coach John Weishalla. “There are three teams in the state tournament from the Park Region conference (Wadena-Deer Creek, New York Mills, Bertha-Hewitt/Verndale). We knew going into the season that it wasn’t realistic that we would win the conference. At the beginning of the year, we made a goal that we were gonna play the best we could in our conference (5-9 record). But we really had our sights set on the section tournament because we felt that we could really compete with all of those teams to make some noise that that’s exactly what we did.”

The Raiders will face a familiar foe in the first round of the state baseball tournament: conference-foe New York Mills, a team that beat BHV twice on the final day of the regular season 6-1 and 5-4 in extra innings.

“We’ve got a feisty group of guys that love baseball and work very hard,” coach Wieshalla said. “Cole Wieshalla is our senior leader and he pitched really well in the section tournament…30 strikeouts and 3 runs in 23 innings or something like that. We’ve leaned on him pretty heavily, and our defense has played pretty well behind him. I think, right now, our defense looks as good as it has all year. We’ve had a pile of games this year where we haven’t had an error. Our timely hitting has been showing up, where it just hasn’t at some parts of the season. Sometimes we gotta string together two or three hits to score a run…we’re not a great power-hitting team.”

While every spring sports team had to navigate its way through the slow start to the season due to weather, BHV had a unique challenge to overcome: the destruction of the dugouts at their field in Verndale during the May 30th storms.

“We’re in a lucky spot where try to divide our games equally between Bertha and Verndale,” Wieshalla said. “The storm did some damage in Verndale and a lot of times the field was too wet to play in Verndale so we had to play a couple of our home games away from home.”

BHV vs NYM will be the fourth game of the Class A schedule at Joe Faber Field tonight: #1 Hayfield vs. New Ulm Cathedral at 10:30, #4 Sacred Heart vs #5 South Ridge at 1:00, #2 Randolph vs MACCRAY at 3:30. #3 New York Mills will play BHV at 6:00.

“We need to keep doing the things that we’ve done well over the last six games or so: we gotta play solid defense and keep their hitters off balance. Mills is a very aggressive team on offense. We can’t afford to boot the ball around on defense, and we need to take advantage of our baserunners. We need to figure out some way to get them across home plate.”

You can listen to tonight’s game on The Lakes 99.5 at 6:00 with Mike Peterson and Fred Sailer.