At the end of the season, Loyola baseball will lose two of their biggest pitchers, as starter closer Mike Kelly, marketing senior, and Kevin Fontenot, physics senior, will be among the five seniors on the team graduating this May.

Kelly and Fontenot were an integral part of the team’s pitching staff.

As the end of the year Gulf Coast Athletics Conference tournament draws near, Kelly remains one of the pitcher with the strongest record in the starting rotation, leading the team with 37 strikeouts on the season.

Where Kelly has been strong in the rotation, Fontenot has gotten the ball in every save situation Loyola has had the past two years, despite being sidelined with a hamstring injury that kept him from getting in the innings of work he was accustomed to getting.

In regards to his plans with baseball after graduating Fontenot said, “I don’t really have any plans after I’m done playing baseball here.”

Instead Fontenot said he plans to get a degree in civics from LSU and job over the summer.

Fontenot also said, ” I got in engaged on April 9 and hope to have the wedding over the summer.”

When reflecting upon his success at Loyola downplayed his individual success, Fontenot said,

“I know I set records but I was more important to be a positive impact on the team.”

Fontenot said that even with the team failing to end the season above .500 in his five-year tenure with the team he will still look back at his time at Loyola with fond memories.

“I don’t have any regrets here,” he said. “With some of the teams we’ve had here I fell like we should have won more games but I’ll never regret meeting these guys (on the team).”

As the closer closes out his baseball career, starter Kelly said he plans to try start his professional career.

“I’m going to a few professional try outs,” said Kelly. “I’m also playing in the Jay Hawk League and a few kids get drafted (by professional teams) from there every year.”

Kelly said his playing on his summer league team will help professional scouts assess weather or not they think he has the ability to play at the next level.

In order to give scouts an even better look, Kelly said he will go to an individual showcase.

“It’s basically a tryout where you give them your position and they try you out on the field by yourself,” he said.

Though Kelly played the outfield throughout his college career, he said he will focus only on pitching.

He said scouts will be using a radar gun to gauge his velocity while judging the movement on his breaking pitches.

Though both players were assets to the pitching staff, neither of them expressed too much concern over the state of the Wolfpack’s arms next year.

“They’ll do fine next year once they get going but they need to improve. It’s been the same every year,” said Kelly.

Fontenot gave the young team credit.

“They are going to be good. Pretty much everyone’s coming back,” he said.

Fontenot said that one bat would be hard to replace.

“You’re going to be loosing a lot of RBI’s with (marketing senior David) McChesney graduating,” he said.

Although they have different roles on the pitching staff and different post-graduation plans, both Kelly and Fontenot said they have the same goal: win the GCAC conference tournament.

“There are seven teams in the tournament and before its starts there is a play in game between the sixth and seventh place teams in the conference,” Kelly said.

“We have never been out of that sixth spot and we’d like to do well down the stretch and get into the middle of the pack in the conference.”

Over the past four years Loyola has been sixth with Tougaloo being seventh.

The ‘Pack currently sits in the fifth spot in the GCAC going into their weekend series with LSU-Shreveport which starts April 17.

Hasani Grayson can be reached at [email protected]