The Drill: Conner Connell is a name to remember for Luverne baseball
May 16—LUVERNE — When Luverne baseball superstar Conner Connell was in eighth grade he messed his baseball mechanics up and it might have just been the best thing to ever happen to him.
Because in order to relearn the correct mechanics and regain control on his pitches he was put in contact with former Sioux Falls Canaries pitcher Kris Regas, who works for the Harrisburg Baseball Association in Harrisburg, South Dakota.
Regas worked with Connell and got him back to a familiar and strong standing with his baseball acumen.
"The biggest thing was just getting out of my head," said Connell to The Globe. "I messed up my arm action over the Covid (baseball) season just working on my own and then Kris Regas — who was one of the best Canaries players of all time — helped me through that and then through the winter I built on it and it gave me a really good base for the spring season."
In Connell's freshman year he pitched as a closer on longtime manager Mike Wenninger's final Cardinals team.
Now as a junior, Connell is a hard throwing hurler at the top of Luverne's rotation. Connell throws his fastball upwards of 89 mph and also throws two breaking balls — including a rare prep slider.
Connell continues to meet up with Regas. In the winter he drives to Harrisburg three times a week to practice with the South Dakota amateur baseball champion.
That is not the only extra time Connell dedicates towards baseball. This past summer he had just 12 days when he was not traveling around the Midwest during his summer with the Northstar baseball club league team based in Burnsville.
The summer was highlighted by an invite to play in Atlanta, Georgia, with 15 of the best prep baseball players in the country.
The crazier part of the story? After pitching that morning in Atlanta, Connell flew back to Minnesota and pitched for the Luverne Redbirds in the Legion Baseball State tournament.
Connell was born in Wyoming but his family originally hails from Luverne. They moved back to southwest Minnesota when he was young. His older sister Billi Connell plays softball at the University of Minnesota.
A role model for Connell? None other than Caleb Thielbar, a relief pitcher for the Minnesota Twins who also refound his pitching motion in Sioux Falls while working as the pitching coach for Augustana University — who now has a multi-million dollar contract pitching professional baseball.
(Correction Thielbar played college baseball at South Dakota State University and not Augustana as was previously stated in The Globe.)
Oh and he is also a pretty good football player. On offense he splits his time between quarterback and wide receiver.
To see a video of Conner Connell, go online to
. Here's a sample of our interview:
QUESTION: Have you got a special story to tell us about your high school athletic career?
ANSWER: I have two of them. The first story would probably be at practice we have a turtle — which is just a batting cage which, when we are hitting bp (batting practice) on the field, it keeps the ball corralled. And as a freshman I was put on the duty of bringing the cage back and forth. I was bringing the cage in and the automatic sprinklers came on and I happened to run over the sprinkler with the turtle batting cage and the sprinkler burst open and there was water all over the field. That was kind of an embarrassing moment but it is kind of funny now.
The other one was probably in the middle of the season and we were up by 15 (runs) or so. Before I even had the ball in my hand it was 10-0 and it was the third or fourth inning one of the last ones. There was a questionable call at first and Mr. Wenninger was really fired up about it even though we were up 15-0. I think he was pretty close to being tossed and I didn't really mean to but I held him back a little bit. After he said, "Nobody has ever touched me before on the mound and I don't know if I feel good about it or bad."
