Knights to play hardball against baseball foes this spring
Apr. 14—"Pitching and defense have always been there for us since I've been here," Northview High School baseball coach Craig Trout pointed out earlier this week, and mentioned several examples to corroborate that theory — including former Knight Braydon Tucker, part of a combined no-hitter at Indiana University a few days prior to that.
Rest assured that the Knights, who remained unbeaten after winning Tuesday night's Western Indiana Conference game against Greencastle, are built the same way in 2021.
And for all the former Knights still pitching in college baseball, and there are several, the current Northview staff has a chance to be the best of all of them. In terms of size, strength and sheer, country-hardball power, it might be already.
Four-year varsity pitchers Gavin Morris and Dylan Zentko are Northview's 1a and 1b punch — Trout says there's no No. 2 there — and there's plenty of depth behind them.
Northview has pitched four shutouts in its first five wins. Morris and Zentko already have a combined no-hitter of their own — Morris took a perfect game into the seventh inning of that contest, but after an error spoiled that quest it was Zentko who got the last three outs — and Zentko pitched a five-inning, 11-strikeout, zero-walks no-hitter on Tuesday.
"We're definitely going to be a tough team to hit [against]," the 6-foot-3, 215-pound Morris said earlier this week, "and one through nine [in our lineup] can put the bat on the ball, and sometimes that's all you need."
"I think we are gonna dominate," the 6-1, 237-pound Zentko agreed. "We have high expectations; I think we're gonna do good things."
Northview football fans may think there's a typo in the previous paragraph, because Zentko weighed as much as 336 pounds as a lineman for coach Mark Raetz's Knights. Yes, he's lost 99 pounds since, as Raetz said, "going from not ever playing football to being a two-year starter and an all-conference lineman."
"One day I woke up, and it just connected," Zentko said as an onlooker mentioned he could make a fortune selling the secret of that weight loss. "I went outside, quit eating unhealthy foods . . . I wanted to be the best me for my last year of high school."
Morris is no stranger to working out either. After his junior season was canceled by the pandemic, he used his free time wisely. "Broke my heart," he said. "I'd put in all that hard work, and it gets taken away for a year. So I picked up golf, and I ramped up how much I hit the weight room."
Only Morris knows whether the addition of golf to his routine has been beneficial, but his dedication to fitness is as obvious as Zentko's newly svelte physique.
So Morris, headed to the University of Southern Indiana for his college baseball, can attack with a right-handed fastball that might start consistently reaching the 90-mph threshold this year. Zentko, a lefty headed to Anderson University, has been in the mid- to high-80s in the past and might find himself throwing harder too. "I'm quicker, and it's easier to throw [since the weight loss]," he said this week.
Considering that those two are backed by a pair of juniors who also throw hard, Coy Edwards and 6-5 Landon Carr, Trout and the Knights have plenty of options.
"We can't complain about starting 4-0," Morris said earlier this week. "All the guys are buying in and putting in all their work, and Landon and Coy have done a great job coming in [as first-year varsity pitchers]."
"I have utmost confidence that if we can put up four or five runs we're in the game or winning the game," Trout said. "And [Morris and Zentko] are the keys to the offense too. They hit three and four [in the batting order], and they both homered against Martinsville [last Friday]."
