Minot North senior Brody Mueller led the team with a .426 batting average last season, recording eight doubles, five triples and a home run while driving in six runs and scoring 13 times. On the mound, he sported a 1.78 ERA in 31.1 innings pitched.

Heading into its first season as a varsity program last year, the Minot North baseball team knew they were going to experience some growing pains from opening pitch all the way through the final out.

The Sentinels certainly took their licks and finished the season with plenty of bumps and bruises. They compiled a 3-20 overall record and went 3-17 in conference play to place 10th out of 11 teams in the WDA standings. Minot North got a taste of postseason baseball by grabbing the final spot in the play-in round, falling to Bismarck Century to end its season.

With a year under their belt, the Sentinels begin their second season with more experience and the knowledge of knowing what they have to do to take a step in a positive direction.

“It was kind of eye-opening for a lot of guys,” Minot North coach Bryan Krahler said. “They saw what the challengers were that came with playing varsity baseball and how difficult it was at times to manage the season, but throughout it we still competed and every day they came and tried to get better. This offseason was huge for our guys getting stronger, bigger, faster. Going into this year, they all feel and know what to expect and know what we have to do. It was a big year for us even though we didn’t have a lot of success in wins, but just gaining that experience, playing and competing and failing, honestly, was huge for them to learn to see what we need to be.”

Minot North brings back all but two players from last year following the graduation of Hudson Lach and Nicholas Thomas. This year’s roster includes nine seniors and seven juniors, led by all-state and all-WDA selection Brody Mueller. The Minot State commit led his team in batting average (.426), hits (26), doubles (8), triples (5) and runs scored (13). He also hit a home run and knocked in six runs. On the mound, Mueller was the team’s ace, sporting a 1.78 ERA over 31.1 innings. He earned one of Minot North’s three wins and struck out 47.

“The strength is our senior class or our experience because looking around the West and the state, teams lose at minimum five seniors from last year and we only lost two,” Mueller said. “So that’s big for us that our team’s played together since sophomore year and grown and I think we’re ready to compete at a good level of competition at the varsity level.”

Thomas’ departure leaves a gap in Minot North’s pitching rotation, as he hurled the third-most innings last year with 21.2. Kayden Danielson threw the second-most innings with 23.2, registering a 4.73 ERA, striking out 24. Danielson led the team with two wins on the mound.

Still, Krahler believes that pitching will be Minot North’s biggest strength this season due to their depth in the bullpen. The Sentinels used 13 different arms last year and six tossed at least 10 innings. TJ Hjelmstad had the second-best ERA amongst pitchers with 10-plus innings pitched with a 4.44 ERA across 17.1 innings. Gannon Hedberg (15.1) and Mason Stewart (11) also threw more than 10 innings last season.

“We have a lot of arms and a lot of arms that have pitched in varsity games and a lot of arms that have been pretty successful,” Krahler said. “We have two guys going to college that one will go as a two-way player and one that will pitch at Bismarck State (Hedberg). We have a couple juniors that have seen a lot of success on the mound and that’s going to be our strength, whether that’s going to be strikeouts or getting weak balls put in play, if our defense can help them out, those guys are going to see a lot of success.”

Defensively, the Sentinels surrendered 141 runs in their inaugural season, allowing 10+ runs in seven contests.

Offensively, Minot North is hoping for a bit more production from the bats. The Sentinels hit .232 as a team, producing 127 hits in 548 at-bats and driving in 51 runs. Hedberg was the only other Sentinel aside from Mueller to hit above .300, batting .316. He led Minot North with 10 RBIs. Mueller and Hedberg were two of four players with at least 15 hits, as Levi Balas and Stewart recorded 16 and 15 hits, respectively.

The Sentinels scored two runs or fewer in 15 games last season, including the final seven.

“If we produce more runs than last year and strikeout less, that will be a huge difference-maker,” Mueller said. “We struck out a lot last year. That’s been one of our primary focuses in practice is having a good approach at the plate, trying to put the ball in the play to try and score more runs.”

The Sentinels struck out 177 times last season.

“We’ve been stressing approach,” Krahler said. “Another thing that’s going to help us is we had some guys that got to play Vistas, so they got to see some really good pitching in the summer. They have that full year of varsity for us last year and then going into this year I hope that translates as well for them going to varsity pitching. Being a year stronger and a year more experienced is what we expect is going to help these guys.”

Mueller, Hedberg, Stewart and Balas spent the summer together playing with the Vistas, while Danielson spent most of his summer with the Metros. The level of talent they faced in the summer should translate to more success this spring.

“It will help a lot because we faced a lot of good arms last year at the Vistas level,” Mueller said. “Seeing those arms just helps us dial in and it makes slower pitching a lot easier. We played close to 50 games last summer and that in itself helps because being on the field in game situations 50 times in 60 days is huge to develop skills and bounce back from the season we had last year at Minot North.”

Minot North was picked to finish ninth in the WDA preseason coaches’ poll, one spot below Jamestown and one spot ahead of Bismarck St. Mary’s. Bismarck Legacy is the preseason favorite, topping the poll with six first-place votes. Mandan and Dickinson were picked to finish second and third, respectively. Minot North defeated Dickinson in the nightcap of their season-opening doubleheader for the program’s first victory. The Sentinels’ other two victories came in a doubleheader sweep of Bismarck St. Mary’s.

Krahler believes that being able to win the close games will determine what type of season the Sentinels have in Year 2. In last year’s West Region standings, first-place Minot High and sixth-place Dickinson were separated by just two games. Minot North was 1-5 in games decided by three runs or fewer last season.

“We have to learn to win and what I mean by that is when we’re in tight games, we need to find ways to win those tight games, and that might be a play or two away from winning a game,” Krahler said. “We had some games where I thought we should have won them and it was just making a pitch or making a play here and there and that would have went a different way. For these guys, we’re trying to challenge them as much as we can in practice. We know it’s not game-like, but if you make practice hard, it makes games easier. Finding ways to make it game-like and finding ways to just challenge them so that we can win those tight games, that’s usually where you see the difference between the top teams and the teams at the bottom.”

The Sentinels open their season with a doubleheader at home against Williston on Saturday, March 28, at Corbett Field beginning at 11:30 a.m.