Area class 3A baseball squads will start their sub-state play tonight and it just happens that the two 3A clubs are playing each other when the Red Rock Rivalry gets a 2nd chapter for 2022. Knoxville took the regular season game over Pella back on May 27th winning 2-0. The Panthers got a two hit shutout from Beau Leisure and halted a Pella squad that was at the time outscoring its opponents 64-12. Since then the Panthers won a share of the South Central Conference championship, and Pella rebounded to go 20-14 and finish 11-10 in the Little Hawkeye Conference, good enough for 4th. Knoxville Catcher Hayden Hatch tells KNIA/KRLS Sports, catching tonight’s starter Beau Leisure has been fun this year and he hopes the rest of his teammates step up to have a repeat performance of the regular season.

Hatch: Pretty easy for him, he’s hitting his spots now, and he’s been spectacular. We know we can beat them, but we also know that we can’t mess around because they’ll come back on us because they’re a really good team.”

Pella Coach Jesse Jablonski tells KNIA/KRLS Sports they need to pick up things they were unable to against Leisure to have success tonight…

Jablonski: “Coach Devore has been doing a great job with that group over there, we think Leisure is going on that night and we just need to pick up on the offspeed out of the hand quicker than the last time.”

What helped Leisure in that game on May 27th was his 15 strikeouts and Jablonski knows if his team strikes out 15 times tonight, it will be a long night. You can hear the action one of two ways, the Knoxville perspective on 95.3 KNIA or the Pella perspective on kniakrls.com KRLS3 and Pella Dutch Live. Both pre games will start at 6:30.