ROCORI Baseball Prepares for Start of 2022 Season

The time of the year we’ve all been waiting for is finally among us. The snow has finally melted, the green grass has started to appear, and that means it’s officially time for the 2022 ROCORI Spartans baseball season.

With practice continuing, the 2022 regular season begins this week for ROCORI as it tries to put together another deep postseason run.

ROCORI enters the new year after putting together another strong showing in 2021. The Spartans finished the year third in the Central Lakes Conference standings with a record of 10-4 and ended up receiving the No. 4 seed in the Section 8-3A Playoffs after concluding the regular season schedule with a record of 15-10.

ROCORI ended up making another deep run in the postseason, coming just a few short of advancing to another state tournament. The Spartans reached the Section 8-3A Championship, where they fell to Sartell to see the season come to a close. Now with a new year on the minds of ROCORI, it will try to not only get to the Section Championship, but surpass that point to get back to the State Tournament.

On this year’s team, the Spartans will have a total of seven seniors, 13 juniors, 13 sophomores and 26 freshmen to round out the high school-level teams. The coaching staff for this season’s Spartans squad will look fairly similar to recent years, with the varsity team once again being led by head coach Jeff Illies, who will kick off his 17th season at the helm while entering with a record of 231-118 (66 percent) overall.

Along with Illies, the varsity team will be filled out with assistant coaches Aaron Schneider, Sean Terres, Greg Spanier, Boogs Rausch, Chad Hess, Brian Hansen and Zach Barrett. Junior varsity will be coached by Brady Leverington, ninth grade will be coached by Derek Ruff and Will Kleinschmidt, eighth grade will be coached by Collin Spooner and Dustin Kremer, and seventh grade will be led by Justin Baumgarten and Shannon Johnson.

You can view the full schedule and the results after each game throughout the season here.

Follow ROCORI Baseball On Social Media

Throughout the season, make sure to follow all the action on social media to catch news on all things ROCORI baseball.

You can follow us on Twitter (@ROCORI_Baseball), Facebook (ROCORI Spartans Baseball) and Instagram (@rocori_baseball) to receive daily and weekly posts on team news, game information, results and more!

And like in past seasons, you can once again follow ROCORI baseball on GameChanger to catch live play-by-play information during each game this season.