Markesan Baseball Feeling The Sting Of Season Being Cancelled

After an unbeaten Trailways West season and a runner-up finish in the 2019 WIAA Division 3 State Baseball Tournament, the Markesan High School baseball team had high hopes before COVID-19 shut down the spring sports season.

Markesan brought back four 1st team All-Trailways West players off of a team that went 22-6 overall and 14-0 in league play in 2019.  The 2020 Baseball Wisconsin Yearbook had Markesan ranked #4 in their preseason Division 3 rankings behind #1 Lake Country Lutheran, #2 Mineral Point and #3 and defending state champion Stratford.

Coach Slark tells DailyDodge.com that the season being cancelled was a crushing blow to his squad that had high expectation and huge goals moving into this year, but now all they can say is “what might have been.”  Slark says that even with the start of the season delayed and school being cancelled, they had hoped that that they still might get a chance to at least compete for a conference title in some sort of a short season. He adds that as the weeks went by, they came to the grim realization that any sort of a season probably wasn’t going to be a happen.

It’s now been a couple of weeks since the WIAA officially cancelled the spring sports season and Slark says that the team has accepted that they won’t get a chance to get back to state this year.   Slark says that the season being cancelled is not only heart wrenching for his senior players, but also the parents and community who won’t get to see those kids play again.

Slark adds that this group of seniors meant a lot of him as it was one of the first group of kids he worked with when he coached at the middle school level. This year’s senior class included; Ethan Augustynowicz, Josh Boening, Cayden Plagenz, Christian Schwandt, Max Stellmacher, and Bryson Zuhlke

As they work through the sadness of not getting to play this season, Slark says Markesan baseball isn’t going anywhere.  He says that the future is the bright as they have strong freshman and sophomore classes to mesh with what would have been this year’s juniors.  He advises you stay tuned because the next few years are going to be pretty special for fans of Markesan baseball.

Click the link to hear a compete interview with Markesan baseball coach Dean Slark