WENDELL — Warrior baseball coach Kerry Kincaid said he hopes his summer-league baseball team is as successful as it was last year.

The team went 18-0 last year, making that a pretty high bar to clear, but much of last year’s perfect squad returns for the 2009 season, and many new faces will join the ranks on both the junior and senior teams.

“Senior-wise we’ve got a lot of kids here from last year,” Kincaid said. “We only lost two — Nate Lusk, who’s playing Legion ball in Clayton, and David Lanier, who graduated.”

Rising sophomore Jonathan Aparicio will play a limited amount for the Warrior summer team. He’s also playing on a showcase team so he’ll slip in when he can.

Kincaid said there’s a lot of youth coming onto the junior team, but many of them are hard workers. He said it will be interesting to see what they have to offer. He’ll play some of them with the senior team for experience purposes.

“The senior team plays closer to the rules of the high school team, so I’ll let some of them get out there with the senior team to see what it’s about,” Kincaid said. “Hard work is what we’ve seen so far, so we’ll see how they do when they get to the field.”

There’s a large crowd of rising juniors between the two teams, and Kincaid said summer ball will be a good chance to see what they’ve got.

The three rising seniors, including Garrett Johnson, Parker Roach and Eric Hardin, are some he’s keeping an eye on. Kincaid said he’s expecting their leadership with the younger players to carry over into the spring.

“I just want to see guys getting better. To me, we didn’t work as hard as we should’ve in the school season. It starts with me, and we’ve got to make them work harder,” he said. “Especially with these younger kids coming in, we have to get them to understand if we want to get where we want to be we have to work. But summer’s fun — there’s less pressure, and we can just continue to work to get better and start a tradition of winning rather than win a few years, lose a few.”