Buena Vista lands three on American Rivers all-conference baseball team

Buena Vista’s uneven 10-28 season still produced a clear marker of progress: three Beavers, Ean McDaniel, Koleson Evans and Cooper Sobeck, earned second-team spots on the American Rivers Conference all-conference baseball team for the first time in their careers.

The selections say as much about the program’s shape as they do about the individual seasons. McDaniel gave Buena Vista a dependable arm at the front of the rotation, making six conference starts and going 2-4 while logging 36 innings with 30 strikeouts and 17 walks. Evans emerged as one of the league’s most improved pitchers, leading the Beavers with 11 appearances against ARC opponents and finishing 2-2 with a 2.05 ERA. In 30.2 innings, he held hitters to a .138 average and struck out 41. Sobeck supplied the offense, leading Buena Vista with 98 at-bats and batting .337 in conference play, a mark that ranked among the league’s top 15.

That mix mattered for a team that entered 2026 with higher expectations than its final record suggested. The American Rivers coaches had picked Buena Vista second in the preseason poll, behind only Coe, after the Beavers won the 2025 conference tournament for the fourth time in program history and first since 2019. Instead, Buena Vista spent much of 2026 fighting through close games and inconsistency, finishing 6-18 in conference play and in the lower half of the standings.

Even so, the honor roll showed that the Beavers were not built around one isolated star. Two pitchers and one position player earning all-conference recognition points to balance across the roster, and to a staff that kept developing players as the season wore on. That was especially evident in the way Sobeck and the offense flashed in key moments. Buena Vista opened league play with an 11-inning, 7-2 loss to Dubuque on March 20, then answered the next day with an 11-1, seven-inning win on Sobeck’s walk-off single. Later, on March 31 against Central, Sobeck went 3-for-4 with two triples, an RBI and three runs scored.

Sobeck’s 33 hits tied for fifth-most in the ARC, and his six doubles plus a league-high five triples gave Buena Vista a needed extra-base threat. McDaniel, a junior right-hander from Pleasant Hill majoring in agriculture business, and Evans, whose high school résumé already included notable multi-sport honors and records, rounded out a group that helped keep Buena Vista visible in a deep conference. After a season that tested the Beavers, three all-conference selections gave Storm Lake another sign that the program still has enough pitching, enough offense and enough talent to stay in the mix.