One day last spring, Evangelical Christian Academy baseball coach Bob DeRuiter and his players went to Village Green Park just across the street from the high school to find they were locked out.

Typically, they could walk onto the baseball field without any problems and start warming up and conducting throwing drills. Not on this day. They saw a fence surrounding the field and the entrances secured.

This was how they found out they no longer had a home practice field.

Nonetheless, the Eagles still finished 16-6 last season – their first winning record since 2013.

Despite losing four seniors to graduation, this year’s squad has hopes of having another successful year. And the Eagles will once again go through the season by bouncing from one field to another to practice.

They play their home games at El Pomar Youth Sports Complex.

For now, they still practice at Village Green Park baseball field when possible but, DeRuiter said, the Colorado Springs Little League — in partnership with the city’s Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services Department — uses it during the spring season. Therefore, they occasionally will have to load into a van and drive to nearby Palmer Park to practice.

There, the ECA players get a playground feel because of unintentional dirt mounds and holes in the baseball field. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“You can take a bad hop over there, you can practice anywhere,” senior catcher Zach Perry said.

The Eagles finished last season second in the Class 2A District 8 League standings behind champion Peyton. Two of their top pitchers — senior Ben DeRuiter and junior Daniel Perry — from last season return.

And with that kind of pitching, Coach DeRuiter believes his team can earn another 16-win season, or even better.

“If we can pitch well and throw the ball over the plate,” he said, “we can see us about where we were last year and maybe a little better if we throw a little higher percentage of strikes with our pitches.”

Other key players for ECA include senior infielder Jacob Kim, senior infielder/outfielder Cameron Rawlings and sophomore infielder/pitcher Andrew DeRuiter. Rawlings, Kim and Ben DeRuiter will transition to baseball after the basketball team’s postseason run ends.

“If we keep it in the strike zone, we should be pretty good,” Perry said.