Baseball Cats Heading to Florida for Final Time?

Every year for spring break the Westminster Christian Academy baseball team goes to Florida to practice and play games to warm up for the season.

The school tried to shut down the Florida trip for the baseball team for this years spring break, but it helped that new head coach Dan Petke has been going to Florida for many years. Coach Petke has been to Florida with the team 7 years in a row, so he was able to persuade the school to allow the baseball team to continue going to Florida.

Many years ago Westminster made a rule where sports teams were not allowed to practice over spring break, but the baseball team got an exception to the rule because they were already a few years into the tradition of going to Florida.

This year the women’s lacrosse team requested to allow their team to go to Chicago during spring break to play against other teams and practice somewhere away from home. The school told them that they could not go to Chicago because of the rule, so they tried to enforce the rule for the baseball team too.

This has been a tradition for just over 20 years. The team has stayed in many different places in Florida, but of all the different places coach Rich Van Gilst has chosen to come back to Vero Beach every year.

Although Westminster’s legendary coach has retired from his 33 years of coaching, there will be no hiccups in the program as 7-year assistant coach Dan Petke knows the ins and outs of the team.

The team lost 9 seniors last year and the team battled for 3rd place in the state. Many of these seniors played key roles on the team, one of them getting drafted by the Phillies and two others went on to play Division 1 baseball.

In the past, the first games played were in Florida, but this year spring break is a week later in March so the baseball team will have already played 6 games in St. Louis before leaving for Florida.

Instead of only playing four games like in the past and practicing almost every day, the team will play six games in Florida this year (4 Varsity games and 2 JV) only practicing on the first two days. Westminster has only ever lost a single game in Florida and hopefully they can continue the trend this year after playing three more games than usual.