BELTON — The way Mike Stawski sees it, UMHB Baseball’s marquee opening weekend series against 12th-ranked Claremont-Mudd-Scripps has no real downside.
If his team gets its 2026 campaign off the ground by picking up a series win over a talented squad picked to win the always-stellar Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, the confidence from the preseason will only grow, as will UMHB’s resume. And if CMS gets the best of The Cru—not that anyone in the UMHB locker room has any plans of that happening—it will serve as a reminder of the work still to be done for them to reach their goals of making noise on the national scene.
Either way, it will be quite the season-opening weekend at Red Murff Field, starting with Friday’s 6 p.m. opener.
“We’re excited to play this type of team,” Stawski said Wednesday. “Obviously they’re ranked very high and coming off a great season going to a Super Regional. To be able to square off with them this early in the season is awesome for us.
“I think it’s a win-win. If we go out and play well, and are able to grab a few games from this type of team, it puts a lot of confidence into our guys and shows them what kind of roster we put together and where our preparation is. And if we fall short against a really good team, I think it helps tell our guys that it’s a long season and there’s a lot of work to be done. The work doesn’t stop just because Game 1 is here.”
The opening weekend will be just the beginning of a packed slate for the Crusaders, who also host No. 15 Webster on February 13-14 and No. 16 La Verne on March 13-14. Playing in a four-team American Southwest Conference this spring, UMHB had plenty of non-conference dates to fill and used them to build an incredibly-strong regular season schedule.
“With the new NPI system that’s in place, everyone is still trying to figure out what that formula looks like and which teams to put on your schedule,” said Stawski, who is entering his seventh season leading UMHB. “At the end of the day, I’m always under the impression that you have to play the best schedule possible and win some of those games too.
“So bringing teams in like Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, Webster, North Central, and La Verne—there’s no doubt that those are perennial, top-of-the-line teams. I believe that gives us the best chance to be successful in May. Unfortunately, I’ve seen too many teams walk into May with a really good record, but they’ve played a soft schedule, and they aren’t ready for those types of teams in the playoffs. If we have a good season and we’re blessed to make a little bit of a playoff run, experience will definitely be on our side, playing about half our schedule against what I believe are Top 30 teams in the country this year.”
Stawski has a group ready to meet that challenge, which is the other half of the equation when it comes to scheduling strong. Facing that caliber of competition puts a team in position to build an NCAA Tournament-worthy resume, but then the team itself has to capitalize on those opportunities.
This year’s Crusaders are capable of doing that.
“We’re young on the mound and old in the lineup,” Stawski said. “I think we can use that to our advantage. The old guys are anxious and excited, but they understand that there’s a lot of ups and downs in the season and that game one isn’t our world series. So you’re going to see a lot of poise in our lineup. And I think the young guys might be just too young to understand how good of an opponent they are and how cool of a game it is. So we really have both sides of the spectrum. But at the end of the day, we’re walking in ready to put our preparation on the field and hopefully that’s enough to beat what we think is a really, really good CMS team.”
The veteran lineup features several familiar faces from last year’s squad, highlighted by the return of Second Team Preseason All-American Riley Bender. The infielder hit .365 last season in 41 starts, finishing second on the team in both HRs (9) and RBIs (48).
Bender is joined by outfielder Cameron Talburt (.274 BA, 23 SB, 37 runs in 2025), infielder Easton Cline (.312 BA, 22 RBIs in 2025), catcher Jasson Hemmerling (.320 BA in 2025), and outfielder Tyler Betts (.346 BA, 15 RBIs) amongst The Cru’s most prominent returning position players. In total, Crusaders who made at least 20 starts last spring are back for another year, along with two others—catcher Trae Deck III and infielder Austin Birkhoff—who tallied 57 or more at-bats.
The veteran leadership of this year’s team has shown through offseason practice, both in the fall and the early weeks of spring training. Stawski recounted how the team handled the severe winter weather that blew across Texas two weeks ago, forcing his players to practice indoors for several days with Red Murff Field under a sheet of snow and ice. It wasn’t ideal, nor something the majority of the roster—primarily composed of Texas natives—was used to dealing with. But they battled through just the same, with the younger players following the lead of the juniors and seniors.
“We were practicing in the gym and on the football field, and our guys didn’t bat an eye,” Stawski said. “Our guys didn’t complain. We weren’t worried about not getting real at-bats, hitting in a cage, or taking ground balls on a gym floor. That just comes from being old. Quite honestly, the younger guys always follow that lead.
“We say all the time, ‘The attitude is going to reflect the atmosphere.’ Our older group would go into the small gym as we’re throwing bullpens and trying to work on footwork with a positive attitude, like, ‘Man, at least we get to do this. At least we have space where we can do this. We’re here together, so let’s go get it.’ That would stop other people in their tracks to think, ‘If the older guys aren’t complaining, we can’t be complaining about this. So let’s just attack this day.’”
The positive approach produced desirable results for Stawski’s squad, even if a portion of the crucial stretch leading into the season opener looked different than normal.
“We took off as a group,” said Stawski, who gained plenty of experience with practicing indoors due to weather during his stellar run as head coach at Concordia-Chicago from 2015-2019. “The freeze actually kind of helped us, because it put a little adversity into what we were doing in the spring and it really unified this group.”
On the mound, 2025 ASC Pitcher of the Year Kolby McBee returns for a second season in Belton, leading the way for a staff that features a solid mix of returners, transfers, and freshmen. The pitching staff is the intriguing piece of the puzzle with this year’s squad, as the depth is amongst the best UMHB has had during Stawski’s time at the helm of the program.
“We had a staff meeting the other day, and we said, this is probably the deepest we’ve been able to go into the bullpen and feel good about guys really competing and getting outs consistently,” Stawski noted. “In the past, we were top-heavy and would get into Game 3, and get a little worried about who was going to win the fifth or the ninth because we were running short on arms. We just don’t see that happening [this season].
“There are guys who aren’t going to throw this weekend that we think are going to help us win conference games, just because we may not have enough innings to give everyone a chance because we feel really good about our top-end guys.”
It’s a good problem to have for a team that will face its fair share of power-hitting lineups during the season, starting with a CMS lineup that brings back five hitters who posted a batting average above .300 last season. Having so many reliable arms on staff will bode well for The Cru in conference play as well, with the ASC using a four-game series format for the second straight season.
“We’ve broken up the staff into three categories,” Stawski continued. “We always say, you need 9-10 guys per weekend; that’s usually what you go through. Then you have your next four or five. Then there’s the four or five after that. Those groups have changed and gone back and forth. It’s funny, when we asked the coaching staff, ‘Give me your top 10,’ there were 16 to 17 different guys [listed]. And it’s not like it was, ‘Well we all have the same nine and then we’re all arguing over who No. 10 is.’ There’s just so many guys we pulled into the top 10.”
The exceptional depth of the pitching staff hasn’t only been evident to the coaches. The players have taken note too, and that only adds to the confidence heading into the season opener.
“We talk to the players all the time, and they have a voice [in our program],” Stawski said. “So this week, just in conversation, I’m like, ‘Who should start Game 3?’ When we had those conversations with people, there were seven different names brought to me on who should start Game 3 this weekend, which is unheard of when it comes to starting pitchers. That’s how good our guys have been, and we feel really lucky.”
As Stawski added, now comes the second phase: performing in a game setting. The preseason momentum is there. The right contributors are in place. The chemistry is high. Starting Friday night, The Cru has a chance to put it all together in the regular season, with the lights shining down on Red Murff Field and a nationally-ranked team in the opposing dugout.
“Obviously, the next thing is they have to go perform. They have to go meet some expectations that they’ve set for themselves. But we feel very good about the preparation we’ve put in and the gameplan we have for this weekend and next weekend. You’ll see some new faces, but you’ll also see some new faces that look different from the time they’ve put in since they left campus last May.”
Opening Weekend Schedule
Friday, Feb. 6 | 6 p.m. CT | vs CMS | Belton, TX
Saturday, Feb. 7 | 2 p.m. CT | vs CMS | Belton, TX
Sunday, Feb. 8 | 12 p.m. CT | vs CMS | Belton, TX
Quick Notes
- UMHB will open its season at home for the fourth time in the last six seasons. The Cru is 5-4 overall in those three home opening series since 2021.
- The Cru is facing Claremont-Mudd-Scripps for the first time in program history. The Stags last played in Texas during the 2024 season, sweeping a four-game series at Southwestern.
- UMHB will play eight of its first nine games of the 2026 campaign at Red Murff Field, where they posted a 14-9 record last season.
- Stawski heads into 2026 just three wins shy of the career 350-win mark. He is 347-194-1 in 13 seasons as a head coach.
