Grant Voytovich didn’t mince words about how his freshman season with Bucknell baseball went.

“Last year was pretty bad to be quite honest,” he said.

Voytovich, a Pine-Richland grad, started the first 11 games last year and hit .158 before being relegated to the bench for the remainder of the season.

Fast forward 12 months and he’s a fixture in the middle of the lineup for the Bison. He had a .313 average with 11 doubles and three homers entering the final weekend of the regular season.

How did he get there?

It wasn’t a swing adjustment or a change to his batting stance. It was a return to a mental approach he used while helping Pine-Richland win the 2019 WPIAL Class 6A title that’s been a catalyst for his breakout campaign.

“This year has been about just playing and letting my instincts take over,” Voytovich said. “I didn’t trust myself last year, so this year has been all about confidence and trusting my game. All throughout high school, whenever I did well, I just let my instincts take over and didn’t overthink things. I kind of got away from that last year and put way too much pressure on myself.”

Voytovich said he didn’t have the fall he had hoped to impress the coaching staff and wasn’t even sure if he had a spot in the lineup going into 2022, but was the starting right fielder for the opening weekend at Shipyard Park in Charleston S.C.

He found himself pressing again and had two hits in 12 at-bats.

“The first weekend down in Charleston, I had that same mentality as my freshman year and it didn’t go well,” Voytovich said. “After that, I flipped the switch and figured out what worked for me, from what approach worked at the plate, what pitches to sit on and what pregame routine worked best. After that first weekend, I started to feel comfortable again.”

Following the opening weekend, he responded with a pair of three-hit games in a weekend series at Radford and didn’t look back from there.

He recorded at least one hit in 24 of his next 33 games, including 12 multi-hit games. That’s helped the Bison reach second place in the Patriot League standings. They had a 13-9 record in the Patriot League with a final three-game set at conference leader Army scheduled for April 30-May 1. The Patriot League conference tournament is May 14-15 with the winner receiving an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

Voytovich is slated to play summer ball for the Bluefield (W. Va.) Ridge Runners of the Appalachian League, which is a summer collegiate league sponsored by Major League Baseball.

Before he heads to West Virginia for the summer, he’d like to spend some more time with his Bucknell teammates and reach the NCAA tournament.

“This year has been a ton of fun and I feel like we’ve done pretty well,” Voytovich said. “Our goal every year is to win the conference tournament and play in a regional. If we just play our game and trust ourselves, I think we have a really good shot at doing that.”

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)