Covering UMHB Athletics and the stories behind the score
BELTON — Alex Hill says he didn’t know what to expect when he toed the rubber for his first start of 2026. The Claremont-Mudd-Scripps lineup—which featured five hitters who hit above .300 in 2025—was undoubtedly the best he had ever faced, stacked with veteran bats whose Game 1 performance in the season-opening series the day before yielded 11 runs.
BELTON — On a Saturday evening this past fall, Jordan Cox looked around at his team sitting in the hotel between the first and second rounds of the UMHB Invitational.
BELTON — Brandon McGruder’s arrival to preseason camp earlier this fall came about a week later than most of his new teammates on the Crusader defensive line. He had summer classes to wrap up at Cisco College, delaying his first practice with UMHB to August 18, exactly two weeks before The Cru shifted from camp-mode to the regular season schedule.
BELTON — There are plenty of situations when home field advantage can be labeled as overrated. But not in the case of UMHB Softball.
BELTON — In each of the five full seasons that Mike Stawski has led UMHB’s baseball program, the presence of a Midway High School alum has been felt on the roster.
BELTON — It takes a certain kind of player to excel in the leadoff spot.
The expectation is to be a spark at the top of the order, the sort of offensive contributor who can lay down a perfect bunt, or beat out an infield single in the game’s first at-bat.
BELTON — Mike Stawski knew he had a serious problem. And there was no easy fix.
It was the fall of 2009. The setting: Louisville, Kentucky. And Stawski, just three years removed from his college playing days as a pitcher at Saint Joseph’s College (IN), looked over his new team at Spalding University.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the success of UMHB’s baserunning in baseball and softball this spring. The series originated from our conversations with head baseball coach Mike Stawski and head softball coach Melissa Mojica, as UMHB is currently one of three D-III institutions whose baseball and softball teams each rank in the Top 15 nationally in stolen bases per game. Part 2 featuring Cru Baseball and Mike Stawski will be published on April 8.
BELTON — Shortly after Friday’s 97-89 win over LeTourneau in the American Southwest Conference Tournament semifinal round, Clif Carroll and Eli Beard sat side by side in a press conference, the star guard who had just put up a tournament-record 44 points and the head coach who had relentlessly recruited him through high school and a pair of junior college stops.
When Adyson James was getting ready for her visit to Mary Hardin-Baylor last spring, she made sure to take a quick look at the women’s basketball roster as part of her preparation. And as she went down the list, one name in particular stuck out, more so because of the Corpus Christi hometown than anything else.