There weren’t a lot of memorable moments from Nicolet’s four-win season in 2014.

Knights senior Daniel Schiff was a freshman on that baseball squad and remembers suffering one loss thanks to “a ton of errors” that led to a postgame run.

“We were just yelling at each other as we were running and we couldn’t handle it,” he said. “We just fell apart as a team because of the losses.” 

It wasn’t all bad, despite the 4-27 record that season.

“I made the team as a freshman, so that was definitely something on the bright side,” Nicolet senior Brayden Elliott said.

Schiff and Elliott are two reasons Nicolet is off to a 13-7 start this season. The Knights already have more wins than last year’s team that went 8-23.

They are captains who endured an overall record of 21-72 their first three seasons, so they invested their time and made sure more teammates came to open-gym sessions in the winter.

“It’s been a couple of guys who were on the team through really weak years and not wanting to have that as their legacy in baseball,” Nicolet fifth-year coach Jason Grodsky said last week. “Brayden and Daniel have helped create the culture that we have in our program right now. Our JV team, I believe is 9-2. Our freshman team is 7-4 (as of Tuesday) and in my first year, the freshman team was 1-20 and the JV team was, I believe, 3-20.

“So it’s been an entire change of the culture that we had when I first took over.”

That was in 2013, when the 2001 Nicolet graduate led the Knights to the sectional final and a 17-17 record.  

But Grodsky estimates he had to replace 11 seniors after that season and returned just three players with significant playing time – including just one with pitching experience.

“It was tough at times to take some of the losses, but I saw some of the younger players (in seventh and eighth grade) that were ready to go and knew that in a few years we would be back to the place we wanted to be,” Grodsky said.

Nicolet made slight improvement by winning nine games in 2015 before coming up with just eight victories last year. But at least Grodsky saw the light.

“Even though the wins went down by one, we could see guys that had now played on varsity for a year and were ready to compete (this year),” he said.

It showed last winter, as about 30-35 players in the program participated in every open-gym session thanks to the leadership of Schiff and Elliott. A few years ago, about 10 athletes would show up.

“They’re showing the time they put in is starting to pay off,” Grodsky said. “Guys are excited to be on a winning team right now and they keep pushing hard and working to reach a point that we haven’t been to in a few years. …”

“The (seniors have) seen the program at the low point and really wanted to make sure they left a lasting impression on the team, and have put in the time to get back to where we wanted to be.”

Nicolet entered the season having to replace just three starters and got a boost when senior Isaiah Glidden, a Bradley recruit, joined the roster after playing on a traveling team in previous seasons.

It helped that Nicolet got off to a 5-0 start, scoring a total of 52 runs during that stretch. The streak ended with an 8-2 loss to Grafton on May 30, but Nicolet got revenge by beating the Black Hawks, 14-0, on June 19.

“It seems like Coach Grodsky has his team believing in themselves and playing good baseball,” Grafton coach Brian Durst said. “Having that positive attitude, positive approach to each game – that’s a big part of the battle in any level of athletics, but definitely when you’re dealing with high school players.”