Cottonwood baseball rolling through season so far

By Brian Shaw  |  [email protected] 

For the Cottonwood Colts baseball team, this is the year in which they intend to make serious noise. Highly touted pitcher Hayden Rosenkrantz happened to move into the school’s boundaries from Las Vegas, a defector from the Cuban Junior National team joined the team, and a returning cast of others taking their lumps last season en route to a third place state tournament finish are all ready to make it happen.

“We’ve got a lot of players that have worked hard all year and become better as the season’s gone on,” said head coach Jason Crawford. To that point, Rosenkrantz is 2-1 on the season as pitcher, and three other pitchers have winning records on the mound—including senior Jeff Borquez, who is a sparkling 4-0 as the team’s ace. 

In the season opener, however, the Colts found out that growth sometimes comes the hard way as they lost 5-0 to defending state champion Lone Peak on March 11, squandering in the process the opportunity to avenge last season’s state tournament loss that ended their season.

After that though, the Colts opened their preseason with impressive wins over Fremont and Alta—the latter an 11-1 pasting of a good Hawks team.

On the week of March 21, the Colts opened region play with three wins in a row over Copper Hills. Their schedule then took them on the road to California for a tournament, in which they opened play with a 19-0 pummeling of Savanna (Calif.) before putting up 25 runs against Roosevelt (Calif.) in another shutout victory.

That brought them to a showdown with nationally ranked Tustin (Calif.). The Colts stormed out to a 3-0 lead in the first inning until the second inning arrived, at which point Tustin put together two runs and followed that output up with another four runs the following inning.

Cottonwood made things interesting with a two-run home run by senior Hunter Blunt in the bottom of the seventh, but couldn’t quite manufacture the tying run, losing 6-5.

Upon their return to Utah, the Colts faced off against powerhouse Bingham in a critical region tilt. While the Colts battled hard, they came up short in all three meetings against Bingham—their first region losses on the young season.

In the first game against Bingham, the Colts trotted their ace Rosenkrantz out to the mound. He only gave up two hits, which also happened to be the only runs the Colts gave up in a 2-0 loss. Bingham then went on to win the second game—but only after the Colts were outlasted in 10 innings, 11-6. The final game of the series—the last time the two teams will meet this season—was also one to remember.

Cottonwood stormed out to an early lead in the last game of the series, but Bingham’s bats erupted for six runs through the second and third innings to hand the Colts a 7-4 loss. 

Going forward, the Colts baseball squad will have to continue to prove it has what it takes to hang with the likes of Bingham and Lone Peak—two teams they’ll likely see in the state tournament later this May. It started out the week of April 10 with two impressive wins over Brighton in the midst of their three-game series. Later, three-game series with Jordan, West Jordan and Taylorsville will close out the regular season. Currently the Colts stand at 5-3 in region play—10-5 overall.