Austin Long is optimistic.

The head baseball coach at the Community College of Allegheny County Boyce Campus in Monroeville hopes the team can return to game action in the spring after last spring’s season was wiped out at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ongoing issues with the pandemic also put a halt to fall baseball activities, limiting team interaction to virtual meetings.

“We’re ready to do whatever is asked of us to make it happen,” said Long, who is working on crafting a spring schedule and has a roster of approximately 30 players, a diverse mix of local talent and others from Florida and Puerto Rico.

“We’re anxious to get back on the field, whenever that is, and hopefully we want to have our full team here.”

Long said that while virtual meetings are valuable, they can only go so far. Past work in the fall has included exhibition scrimmage games against local colleges such as Chatham, Waynesburg, Saint Vincent and Pitt-Greensburg.

“At the junior college level, you are basically starting from scratch in the fall, year in and year out, with a lot of turnover,” he said.

“It’s nice to have all of those exhibition games in the fall. The fall is about exposure and development. It’s where the freshmen grow up quickly. They get out there and get thrown to the wolves. January practices are going to be that much more rigorous and detailed as we catch up before, hopefully, the start of a spring season in March.”

Long said he hopes those players from Florida and Puerto Rico, about 15 in all, will be able to join the team for the spring.

Half of the team’s current roster, Long said, is local talent familiar to followers of WPIAL baseball. Local holdovers include Gateway’s Kris Dick, North Hills’ Tanner Schmitt, Upper St. Clair’s Deonte Jones and Penn Hills’ Tim Hoolahan, James Rose and Malik Mathis.

Incoming freshmen include Shaler’s Kyle Ford and Grant Galloway, Montour’s Nathan Dankis, Chartiers Valley’s Aidan Krieg, Shady Side Academy’s Tevin Anderson, Quaker Valley’s Yeudy Almanzar and Isaiah Piatt, McKeesport’s Roy Butko and Brashear’s Moises Terrero.

“We love to have the players from Florida and Puerto Rico on the team, but we also wanted to get more of the local blood involved, too,” Long said. “We have nine really good players from local high schools coming in. We’re loaded with local pitching and outfield talent.”

The outlook for the spring 2020 season was bright after CCAC Boyce’s record-setting 2018 campaign which saw the team finish 21-12, win the Western Pennsylvania Collegiate Conference title for the second year in a row and reach the Region XX championship game for the first time.

Of the sophomores who moved on from the 2018 team, nine received scholarships to play baseball at four-year schools.

CCAC Boyce was in the final stages of preparation for their March season opener when the team got word the season was in jeopardy before ultimately being canceled.

Several of the Florida and Puerto Rico players went home, but others stayed and were a part of a summer team, the Monroeville Cardinals, coached by CCAC assistant Bill Spina, in the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Adult Baseball Association.

Nine CCAC players, including four from Puerto Rico, joined Gateway graduates and others from the area on the Cardinals squad which went 6-13 overall in the AAA division.

The Puerto Rican contingent eventually had to leave for home, Spina said, for financial reasons.

“That was tough,” Spina said. “They were strong parts of the team.”

But Long and Spina hope a full team at CCAC Boyce can come back strong and push for more championship success.

“Everyone wants to work together to make this happen,” Spina said. “We want all of the families of the players to be confident that we will have a safe environment to play games.”

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