Wausau Woodchucks
WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) — The Wausau Woodchucks will begin their 30th Northwoods League campaign on May 29th.
That’s when the Woodchucks will travel to Madison for a date with the Mallards. The same two teams will then play the Woodchucks home opener at Athletic Park on the 30th for the first of three straight at home.
That series concludes with two games against the Lakeshore Chinooks on the 31st and June 1st.
The Woodchucks will have four separate three-game homestands through late May and the end of June, their longest homestands of the year. There will also be a three-game home stretch in August.
The schedule also features one doubleheader on July 12th at Fond du Lac. That’s sandwiched in between a pair of two-game home series against Green Bay and Lakeshore.
The Northwoods League will once again feature a 72-game season split into two halves. The playoff format also remains unchanged, with two teams from each sub-division playing a best-of-three series. The division championship and league championship, or Summer Collegiate World Series, will each be a single game.
Wausau remains in the Great Lakes West division alongside the Fond du Lac Dock Spiders, Lakeshore Chinooks, Madison Mallards, Green Bay Rockers, and Wisconsin Rapids Rafters. Those teams will comprise the majority of the Woodchucks’ schedule this year along with some East Division crossover games against Rockford, Kokomo, and Battle Creek.
This year’s All-Star break will be from July 24th through the 26th and will feature one game for each division. The Great Lakes All-Star Game will be held in Traverse City, MI and the Great Plains will meet in Bismark, ND.
The Northwoods League’s Great Plains division did expand for 2023 with the return of the Thunder Bay Border Cats, who haven’t played a game in three years due to COVID-19 and travel restrictions between Canada and the USA. They’ve also added a team in Minot, North Dakota.
The travel-only Minnesota Mud Puppies will return for a third season to balance out the division.
There remains no indication that a proposed expansion team in Hudson, the St. Croix River Hounds, will actually take the field. The franchise was awarded to Hudson in 2017 with a planned start date of 2018, but construction delays pushed that project out two years. Those delays were then magnified when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, and the team did not participate in any of the Northwoods League pods that season.
The River Hounds were not included on the 2022 or 2023 Northwoods League schedules, though their website remains online and they remain listed on the league website as an expansion team. However, their last communication to fans came in 2020.
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