Rebuilding has been a general theme across the board for Tennessee Temple Academy athletics this year.

     Middle school baseball is no exception.

     “We lost a lot,” said Temple middle school coach Larry Johnston, who guided the Crusaders to the middle school tournament championship a year ago.

     Not only did Johnston lose seven starters from last year’s championship team, he lost  his top three pitchers.

     “That really hurts,” Johnston said. “We had some pretty good pitchers last year. And as most people know, pitching is key. You’ve  got to have decent pitching if you hope to be competitive.”

     Will so many newcomers and such a young, inexperienced team, Johnston will look for leadership from his lone two returning starters, J.J. Johnston and Will Sexton. Johnston is also looking for big things from talented newcomers Johnny Goodman, Michael Taylor, Seth Hickman, Darius Shannon and Darius Akridge.

     Jacqueze  Robinson,  Davey White and Phillip Edens are among the key  returnees.

     ‘Last year we had a lot of athletes playing baseball whereas this year I feel like we’ve got baseball players playing baseball,” Johnston said. “We’ve got a lot of potential, but we’re going to be very young. We’re going to probably have five sixth-grade starters while most of teams we’ll be playing will be made up of  mostly eighth-graders. We’re going to throw them into the fire and see what happens.”

No Middle School Baseball announcements have been posted yet.

No Middle School Baseball articles or game summaries have been posted yet.