Good luck trying to scout the Bend pitching corps this spring.

Of the 16 players on the Lava Bears’ varsity roster, first-year coach Kevin Cooper said he expects no fewer than 11 to see time on the mound this season.

“That’s the biggest difference; we don’t have that one guy that’s going to get all of the innings,” Cooper said. “We have 11 guys who are highly competitive and want the ball. It’s going to be fun. They’re going to look different each day, because there’s going to be a different guy on the bump.”

Cole Frey, a four-year starter who earned second-team all-Intermountain Conference honors as both a pitcher and a catcher last season, said he has always had teammates who would eat a few innings in a pinch. But most of the emergency pitchers, Frey said, filled in as “an on-the-fly sort of thing” and did not necessarily spend much time preparing for the role.

“This is definitely the most pitchers we’ve ever had,” Frey said. “It gives us a lot more potential, more people we can fall back on when it comes to pitching.”

Cooper said Tysen Scott, who earned all-state honorable mention as a designated hitter in 2017, third baseman Reece Gordon and second baseman Cooper Simmonds will all pitch at the varsity level for the first time as juniors this year.

“We have a lot of depth, which is nice,” Cooper said. “Cole Frey is probably one of the kids who is going to be a headline. I’m sure there’s a couple coaches in the IMC who are going to say, ‘He’s still here? Didn’t he graduate?’ Marshall Davis is going to be another kid who got a lot of pitching for us last year, and will again this year.”

The batting lineup will look more familiar, but that may not be much comfort for opposing pitchers. The Lava Bears scored 215 runs in 2017, the third-most in Class 5A, and most of the lineup is back to do more damage. In addition to Frey, Scott, Simmonds, Gordon and Davis, Kyle Reed and Steve Talamantes return for their second year in the outfield.

“I like that blue-collar and grind mentality, that’s nice. But we’re not opposed to a three-run home run,” Cooper said. “We take a lot of pride in the fact that one through nine are going to have their roles and have their opportunities. It doesn’t stop with that, because we’re going to have some kids come off the bench and pick up roles and pinch-hit opportunities.”

Bend lost to Churchill in the state quarterfinals last spring, but Talamantes said he thinks that this year’s team will benefit from an extra year of experience and maturity.

“Me and Kyle Reed, it was our first year on varsity (last year), and going to the playoffs, we had that stress,” Talamantes said. “We were tense about it. I think this year, we’re going to be loose about it. We know what to expect.”

Cooper was an assistant in the Bend program for a decade before taking over the head coaching role from Adam Randall this season, and both he and the players said he has kept many of the same goals and policies from previous years.

“I’m hard-pressed to find things that are not up to standard, but that’s the role of any coach,” Cooper said. “We’ve told the boys, with them coming in, nothing is written in ink. We have the mandatory three days of tryouts, and we told them we’re going to have over 60 of those (tryouts), because we have over 60 days of practice (during the course of the season. Nothing is locked, and it makes us all better. I’ve signed a one-year contract. I’ve got to earn my spot, as well. So we can model that as a coaching staff.”

The Lava Bears have split their first two games of the season, beating North Eugene and losing, 1-0, at McMinnville on Tuesday.

“Failure is an option in baseball. It happens seven times out of 10,” Cooper said, referring to a hitter with a .300 batting average. “But how we deal with that, how we recover from that, makes us as a ballplayer. We try to carry that outside of the program.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0305, vjacobsen@bendbulletin.com

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected. In the original version, Bend coach Kevin Cooper was misidentified. The Bulletin regrets the error.