EAST HELENA — After East Helena High School’s football team made its first-ever playoff appearance in the fall and East Helena’s basketball team made its first-ever state tournament in the winter, it’s officially East Helena baseball’s turn to put together a memorable season.
“Our school is growing, and numbers build competition,” East Helena head coach Ethan Hoffman said regarding the recent momentum behind the Vigilantes’ sports programs. “And I think we also have multi-sport athletes in this program that play other sports at East Helena High School and have been successful in those sports, and I believe that mentality carries over from program to program. And we’re excited to have that leadership and also to have that leadership build other leaders within our team.”
And while this year’s Vigilantes do feature some of that senior leadership, East Helena has also gotten a boost from its stable of up-and-coming underclassmen.
“Yeah, we’ve grown a bunch,” said sophomore first baseman Jeren Jerome. “We’ve been putting in the work, practicing a ton and just hanging out as a team outside of practice to help us improve on that, too.”
Fellow sophomore Kash Walker added that the Vigilantes worked through the offseason to continue improving.
“We had a lot of offseason work at Granite Peak Athletics, that helped us a lot — being able to get the reps in when we couldn’t physically (be) on the field,” said Walker, who plays second base. “Even though it limited us — we couldn’t take ground balls, fly balls in there — but hitting is still great. And we’ve displayed good hitting in all of our games so far.”
Two years ago, East Helena started its baseball team from scratch. And this year, Hoffman said his program has finally built itself a solid foundation.
“When we first started, we had an upperclassmen group that hadn’t had the opportunity to play baseball into their later high school years,” said Hoffman. “And now we’re starting to get to that point where we’re getting baseball players moving up through the ranks that haven’t had any of those breaks, and so the skill level is starting to grow.”
