The Dolores Bears opened the 2016 baseball season on Tuesday with a 23-1 loss to Moab.<\/p>\n
But after just one week of practices, head coach Rusty Hamilton wasn\u2019t concerned after the lopsided defeat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m upbeat because that\u2019s kind of what I expected,\u201d he said on Wednesday. \u201cBut I saw a lot of promise out of my freshman that I hadn\u2019t seen play yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Bears graduated ten seniors from last year\u2019s league championship squad, including five starters, so Hamilton and assistants Toby McCoy and Troy Mott will need production from their large group of underclassmen.<\/p>\n
Seniors Josh McCoy, Zach Hartle, and Jace Papoff, juniors Brandon Ward and Tyler Nance and sophomores Justin Purkat, Tel Hamilton and David Schmittel all return for the Bears. But with a handful of newcomers, Hamilton is still moving players around to find locks at certain positions.<\/p>\n
With new pitching limitations implemented by CHSAA this season, Hamilton believes a solid pitching rotation will be a key to success. Although he doesn\u2019t have a rotation set yet, he said that the Bears have four or five good pitchers to work with.<\/p>\n
Still early in the season, Hamilton has plenty of time to move players around and solidify positions.<\/p>\n
And the Bears are back in action with games on Friday and Saturday.<\/p>\n
Dolores hosts Monticello in its home-opener today at 1 p.m., and the Bears will play Hotchkiss at Cortez tomorrow at 1 p.m.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hamilton not concerned after Bears season-opening loss<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5770],"tags":[44],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-106283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-high-school-sports","tag-dolores"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106283"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=106283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}