The MCL Minutemen are getting ready for their second season in the Midwest Collegiate League. The season will start out on their home turf at Prairie State College when the Crestwood Panthers come to town on June 1.

The team is starting to meet up and get familiar with one another, and Minutemen manager Deandre Gilmore is excited to get rolling.

“On Saturday, I met with the team,” Gilmore said. “I have some stuff to hand out to them. I’m excited to go ahead and see what these guys can do.”

With the help of his friend and former teammate Francisco Unzueta as his assistant coach, and pitching and catching coach, he is excited about what’s to come and to have him on board.

“Cisco is a pretty good pitcher,” he said. “He’s a smart guy and knows the game in and out. He’s a great guy to have on the staff, and I’m proud to bring him along with me.” 

Although Gilmore hasn’t met with the players yet, he feels confident in the team and their abilities come practice time.

“I feel good; we have a couple of guys from bigger schools who are still in the playoffs,” Gilmore said. “All these guys are pretty eager to get on the field and continue to put in the necessary work in order to get better.”

The first practice of the season was held at Prairie State College on Saturday, May 29. The team got a chance to play with one another for the first time heading into the season. Gilmore is ecstatic about the field being back in use after the pandemic closed everything last summer.

Prairie State made new renovations to the field. They put in 50 tons of red-crushed brick, fixed the mounds, sided the baselines, cleaned up home plate, painted and put up new fencing for the dugouts and put in new fencing around the ballpark.

“I’m happy that we are able to say this is our home field and we are able to play on it,” Gilmore said. “I’m happy for people to come to the field and see the hard work that we have put into the field in order for people to come.”

With the Minutemen days away from their first game, Gilmore wants to make sure that the team is all on the same page before they take the field.

“Right now, I’m just making sure everybody is on the same page,” he said. “ I’m making sure everybody knows each other, everybody is in the group text, anybody can ask questions so they can get to know each other.”

Gilmore wants to have everybody prepared before they start diving into the baseball side of things. He wants everybody to know what’s going on, and understand everything about the league before he jumps into playing. 

“On Saturday, I let the whole bag out,” he said. “We went over certain situations and what we want to do in certain situations.  We dove into exactly what we want to do.”

Even though they don’t have a long time to prepare, Gilmore believes that the players will not need a long time to pick up where they left off.

“These are college guys, so they don’t need that much time to learn anything that they need to learn in order to be successful,” he said. “Baseball is a game that everybody has the same concept, it’s just run a little differently. It’s all the same stuff, it’s just being able to do it right, then it looks different than other teams.”

Gilmore doesn’t believe it will take the players a long time to gel as long as everybody is on the same page. 

The Minutemen have a lot to look forward to this season. They have a couple main goals they are going to focus on come game day.

“We’re looking forward to winning games, going out there and playing good baseball, playing hard and being a very successful team this year,” Gilmore said.