Staff photo / Brian Yauger. Champion’s Hunter Haines throws a pitch against Newton Falls on Wednesday night before the game was postponed due to inclement weather.

NEWTON FALLS — During the beginning stages of the baseball season, teams aren’t just battling each other, but also the elements.

With whipping winds and freezing rain throughout, it’s hard for a team to get momentum. Champion found a way to get rolling early and Newton Falls responded, but right as the Tigers were beginning to make a comeback, the elements were too much and Wednesday’s game was put on hold.

After four innings, the Golden Flashes held a 10-3 lead. Three of those Champion runs came off a three-run homer by Carson Fife.

Fife drilled it to center field for his first home run with the program.

“It was nice to get runners on and do what we do, running the bases well,” Golden Flashes coach Andrew Barker said. “Freshman Zack Morris came through with a couple of hits to get some RBIs and Carson Fife hit his first career home run which was real nice. We’ve just got to deal with the elements. It’s Northeast Ohio baseball. We started in the sunshine, played through the rain and got into the snow, so we have to be able to deal with that better.”

Before reaching his pitch count, Champion’s Hunter Haines had a 10 strikeout no-hitter going. While missing out on the chance to get a no-hitter in the team’s season-opening tilt, Barker knows his pitcher is capable of getting another shot at one soon.

“We talked about throwing more strikes. That’s what Hunter did last year,” Barker said. “He threw a no-hitter (last year) and he’s capable of it every time. Today, he didn’t have to mix in many breaking balls. He just threw a lot of good hard fast balls. He’s throwing mid-80s. He’s a nice senior to have and he came out and showed it today. A few too many high pitch counts and he knows he’s got to work on that. Looking forward to working with him all year.”

With a few innings of live full-speed action in the books, Barker is optimistic.

“Hunter kind of kept us from seeing anything in the field, but I was happy with the bats coming around,” he said. “I’m not sure how many hits we had, but we made good contact and hit the ball hard. Even some of our outs were hard, same with our base running. I’m going to press on that. We’re going to be aggressive, we’re going to get big leads, we’re going to run the bases well. All that stuff, I thought we did real well tonight.”

Just how the rain was eroding the pitcher’s mound, Newton Falls began to erode Champion’s lead in the bottom of the fourth. Trevor Ruscoe helped the Tigers push back with a two-run homer. His two prior swings also landed outside of the park, but landed foul.

Last year’s Tigers teams had a tendency to lay down after falling into a deficit according to coach Chad Rankin. While they didn’t get the chance to fully battle back, there’s some added optimism moving forward that this team is going to scrap for every pitch.

“It was nice. Last year we went through some times where we’d get down big against better teams like this and we just completely quit and give up,” Rankin said. “But today we were able to battle back and build some momentum here in the later innings.”

The game will be resumed this afternoon at 4:15 at Champion High School.

Following that, the teams will play their regularly scheduled contest.