CVU notches first win of baseball regular season

There is some good news and some bad news about the beginning of the Champlain Valley Union High baseball team. The bad news is the Redhawks had to play four regular season games before notching their first win of the 2025 season.

The Redhawks got their first “W” on Tuesday evening with a dominating 11-1 victory over Middlebury. That game was finished too close to print time for a detailed story in this edition of the newspaper. That will come later.

The good news is that the team only has two losses because their Friday matchup against Burr & Burton was declared a 3-3 tie when it got too dark to continue in the ninth inning.

Mount Abraham 8, CVU 7

For most of the first four innings of its first regular season baseball game on April 15, it looked like Champlain Valley’s spring campaign was starting just as the Redhawks wanted, with the team jumping out to a 7-0 lead over visiting Mount Abraham. But, in the fifth inning the Eagles found their offense while CVU’s scoring stalled.

Visiting Mount Abrahams scored four runs in the top of the fifth, adding two more in the sixth.

In the seventh inning, the Eagles capitalized on Abe Ready’s double, two CVU errors and a passed ball to score twice more, pulling ahead for good to take an 8-7 win.

The Redhawks lost even though they led in hitting with 11 to the Eagles’ seven hits.

John Deyo led at the plate for CVU in the losing effort, hittting 3-for-5 with two doubles. Ryan Wood also contributed at the plate, going 2-for-4 with a double and an RBI, as did Riley McDade, going 2-for-4 with a double and two RBIs.

Rice 8, CVU 5

At home on Friday, April 24, in their second regular season game, the Redhawks quickly found themselves behind. In the first inning, the visiting Green Knights’ second batter, Coleton Merchant, knocked a line drive single to right field scoring Oliver Quong.

Merchant scored himself on a bases-loaded walk to put Rice up 2-0.

A couple of pitching errors scored two more runs for Rice in the second inning to make it 4-0 in favor of the visitors.

The Green Knights added another run in the fourth inning when Landon Merchant hit a single between first and second to score Merchant.

The Redhawks got on the scoreboard in the bottom half of the fourth when Noah Musgraves’ deep hit bounced off the tip of Sebastian Parent’s glove in deep left field and over the fence for a homerun that scored McDade to make it 5-2.

Things were looking up for CVU in the bottom of the fifth inning when Riley O’Brien hit a solo homer to make it 5-3.

Unfortunately, the baseball hobgoblins appeared to be in sync with the weather, that had turned gloomy by the top of the sixth inning, when Rice added three runs on two hits and an error to improve its lead to 8-3.

The Redhawks added a run in the bottom of the sixth inning on a Tommy Barnes single that scored Musgraves and another in the seventh when Quinn Vincent hit a line drive that scored Ryan Wood, making the score 8-5. But with two outs, the Rice lead proved too much for CVU to surmount.

After the game coach Nicky Elderton told his team that in this game and the previous game with Mount Abraham, they had played four solid innings and three innings with too many mistakes.

“You’ve got to play a full seven to win any baseball game,” he said.

If there’s one thing he could boil it down to, the coach said he would like to see his players rein in the “freebies” like errors, walks or hit batters.

“If we limit those, we’re very good,” Elderton said. “We have a lot of inexperience this year compared to last year. We’ve got the talent. We’ve just got to put it all together and figure out what that looks like.”

CVU 3, Burr & Burton 3

Champlain Valley traveled to Burr & Burton Academy on Friday for a matchup that had originally been scheduled for Saturday, but was moved forward a day because of predicted, and realized, weekend rains.

In the top of the first inning, Vincent hit a sacrifice grounder that scored McDade.

In the bottom of the second, Burr & Burton tied it up at 1-all on a line drive to center field.

A CVU error in the bottom of the third inning put the Bulldogs up 3-1, but the Redhawks followed in the top of the fourth with a run off a Burr & Burton error to pull within one run at 3-2.

The Redhawks tied the game up at 3-all when a Deyo line drive single scored Daniel Tuiqere. The game stood 3-3 through the next four innings until it was called because of darkness.

“Both teams were hoping to play because it was such a good game,” Elderton said. “But, it was getting dusk, and the umpires felt like it was a smart decision to call the game.”

Elderton felt that his team had grown in the 24 hours between the Thursday game with Rice, when he didn’t feel like his team was consistently battling, and Friday’s game at Burr & Burton when “we kind of put everything together. We competed. We battled. There was some adversity throughout the game where we were put in pressure situations, and we came through.”

He was very impressed with how sophomore Vincent performed in his first varsity game on the mound. “He pitched amazingly and really battled all game. He gave us seven awesome innings,” Elderton said.

He liked how his team was hitting. The Redhawks hit some hard balls that were caught.

“Burr & Burton Academy is a good team. They made all the plays defensively and kind of robbed us of a couple of hits, but that’s baseball,” he said. “We’re going to figure this out as the season progresses. This week will be a big test because we’re starting to play kind of the top teams in Division 1 with Mount Mansfield, Essex and South Burlington three out of our next four games. That will be a true test of where we stand.”