It was all smiles around Mike Lisetski field after the K-Kids baseball team’s season opener last Thursday, a 16-0 Mercy Rule romp over Dieruff in 3-plus innings.

Brady Simock, fresh from his stint on the EPC champion boys basketball team, starred both on the mound and at the plate. The senior left-hander struck out 8 of the 9 batters he faced over three innings of work on the bump. The other reached by walk only to get picked off first by Simock.

At the dish, he had infield singles in each of the first two innings and punctuated the contest with a walk-off two-run homer to right centerfield in the bottom of the fourth. It was the first round-tripper in his high school career.

The Immaculata-bound hurler gave his thoughts after the game, “Everything was working, you know? Mostly my fastball and changeup, but this year I’m really working on getting on top of the hitters and I did that really well today. We know they’re on the weaker side of teams, but we can’t plan down to our competition. We just go out there and play our game.”

While Simock was stifling the Huskies’ offense, Casey Williams jump-started the Kids’ attack with a triple on the first pitch he saw to lead off the bottom half of the first. The senior reached base in all four plate appearances, scored 4 times and drove in a pair of runs.

Every batter for Northampton reached base at least once during the game. Eight of the 10 hitters scored one or more runs.

Aiden Sergent pitched a scoreless fourth inning to keep Simock’s pitch count down.

After graduating two-thirds of the their 2025 at bats and over 70 percent of their innings pitched, head coach Mick Sugra knows that not every game will go as well as this one.

He described the outlook for the team, “JV had a good year last year and we had a good fall. We’re not sure what we’re going to get. We have young guys that have to establish themselves. Brady is obviously our number-one. He had good numbers last year.”

“Our goal is to 10 (wins) and get in (to the playoffs). That’s the goal. We have a really tough schedule like last year. Even teams like North Pocono and East Stroudsburg North have a pitcher that can give us trouble. It’s baseball, it’s pitching. It all comes down to pitching. We’ll what happens,” Sugra concluded.