Briar Cliff baseball coach Boyd Pitkin is calling his team a “pleasant surprise”. Despite losing 12 seniors from a year ago and entering this season with a lot of question marks the Chargers have jumped out to a 7-1 record and the early lead in the Great Plains Athletic Conference race. Pitkin says they usually know they are going to have good pitching and coming into this year that was a question mark, but he says the pitching and the offense has both been good so far this year.

Junior Scott Morton is hitting .372 and has driven in 32 runs for a team that is averaging seven and a half runs per game in league play. “The good thing about this team is it’s just not one guy who had carried us throughout the year,” Pitkin says. He says everyone has stepped up to make it a total team effort.

Pitkin says it will take a consistent effort to make a run at the GPAC title. Briar Cliff visits Grand View on Thursday in non conference action before hosting Corncordia of Nebraska and Nebraska Wesleyan this weekend.