CARROLLWOOD — Stephen Hunt isn’t going to hold back.

In fact, he’s going to continue to apply pressure and keep his foot on the gas. It’s what he did as a local standout player, and it’s what he plans to do as the new Patriots baseball coach — the team’s seventh in the past 10 years.

“Ultimately,” said Hunt, who spent several years as an assistant coach at nearby Berkeley Prep, “I just want to establish a style of play here that fits my coaching style. … I like to play fast, get runners on base. We want to be an aggressive team. We want to take extra bases, steal bases. We do have some guys with some thump. And I think in high school baseball, if you run the bases hard, you can also take advantage of mistakes. There are a lot of great teams, but teams will make mistakes if you speed the game up. You like creating chaos on the bases.

“Whether on purpose or on accident.”

On purpose, the Patriots will have to replace 10 seniors who graduated following the 2025 season. That offseason also saw the departure of four-year coach Tony Brewington, whom the CDS athletic department opted not to retain. Brewington went 67-41 in his tenure, won a program-high 25 games in 2024, led the team to back-to-back region playoff appearances and won the Saladino Tournament Bronze division in 2024.

“We’ve got a younger group of guys,” Hunt said. “We haven’t had a ton of experience at the varsity level. So, coming in as a new coach, we’re obviously building for the future. We’d like to get our guys up to speed as quickly as we can to be competitive right away. I think we have the talent to do that. I think we’re a small but mighty team.”

It will be a mighty task to replace, or at least replicate, some of the numbers put up by departed players. Allen Sorano led the team with 27 RBIs, while Julian Earle, Steven Vargo and Ashton Brown all posted double-digit RBIs and high batting averages. Earle led the team with 34 hits, and Vargo stole a program-record 63 bases over four varsity seasons.

The departures of Nicolas Riedel (6-4, 1.47 ERA, 87 K) and the Mazur brothers, Evan and Logan, who were vital on defense and in relief pitching, also weaken the Patriots on the mound.

But Hunt has an answer for that.

“On the mound, we’re just going to have to pound the zone,” he said. “We’ve got a bunch of young pitchers. We got some freshmen who are contributing this year.”

Already stepping up is junior right-hander Beck Meier, who will be relied on at the plate as well as the mound, just as he was when he drove in three runs to help his own cause in a win over Bell Creek on Feb. 17. Fellow junior Charlie Cooperman, who leads the team in RBIs with Meier second, will also make starts on the mound, while freshman pitcher Cooper Williams has already picked up a win this season.

Hunt didn’t come over from Berkeley Prep empty-handed, though. He brought junior third baseman Matty Coniglio, who is already contributing in a big way.

After registering just 20 at-bats as a sophomore while playing behind freshman starter Mason Warren at Berkeley Prep, Coniglio already leads the team with a whopping .556 average through four games and pencils in as the starting third baseman.

Hunt and the Patriots are going to need these new players and faces if they plan to compete in Class 2A-District 9, which features familiar foe Berkeley but also still-undefeated Tampa Catholic.

“Matty’s been awesome,” Hunt said. “I’m familiar with him, though, since he was a middle schooler at Berkeley. Great kid, great family. He’s come out early swinging the bat, a lot of balls hit hard, and he’s dynamic for us, too. He’s been on winning teams in the past over at Berkeley, and we have a good core group of guys who are already here returning as juniors that our young guys can rally around. So far, I think we have a good nucleus to build on.”