The Highland Huskies are set to throw the first pitch of a new baseball season this week. Highland was one of the area’s most surprising teams last year, as an extremely young roster still finished second place in the North division of the Southeast Iowa Super Conference and won 11 games overall.

Now, with only one senior starter gone, the Huskies look poised to return to the form that led them to nine straight winning seasons between 2014 and 2022 and a trip to state in 2016.

William Dunbar returns after leading the team with a .373 batting average last season and collecting eight doubles, one home run, 17 runs batted in and 18 runs scored.

Fellow senior Logan McFarland is the other top-tier hitter back for Highland, coming off a .333 average, 20 runs scored and 18 RBI in 2024. Both Dunbar and McFarland also had over 20 stolen bases each a season ago.

Senior Ryker Miller is also back for the Huskies after hitting .298 with two homers, while senior Colten Sypherd, junior Bryce Hazelett, sophomore Hunter Seibel and freshman Caleb Wheeler make it seven returning players who played at least 20 games and scored at least 10 runs.

Yet the pitching staff is where Highland is arguably at its best, compiling an impressive 1.87 earned-run average as a team last season.

McFarland, Seibel, Hazelett, Sypherd and Wheeler each threw at least 16 innings and allowed less than 20 earned runs. Huskies head coach Allen Rath tells KCII Sports that his team eventually found a groove last summer that he hopes they can settle into all throughout this season.

“Last year I think it was a little bit of a learning process, [with it being] my first year and the boys getting to know me and me getting to know the boys,” Rath says. “Sometime about halfway through the year, you could almost see [that] the boys were starting to figure it out.”

“When I saw things start to maybe click in [was when] we played Burlington Notre Dame. They were ranked number one [in the state]. Probably, on the books, I was write [that it] was going to be a quick game. But, through five [innings], we were up.”

“The boys realized that we can hang with some pretty solid teams, and I think, from that point on, we played well. Whether we won or lost, the other team knew that  they were in a [competitive] game.”

Highland opens the 2025 baseball season by traveling to face Mid-Prairie on Monday night. You can hear the Huskies take on the Golden Hawks on 102.5 FM and AM 1380 KCII, as well as streaming on KCIIradio.com and the KCII2 app, starting with pregame coverage at 7 p.m.