For me, this year in particular, I would not schedule extremely hard to start with. I always say the early season is for winning and learning your team and this year will be huge for that. When I was varsity HC, I always made sure we had early games we could/should win after a pretty tough tournament that we always started the year with. The problem was the year I intentionally scheduled easy games because I wasn't sure what we had was like last year for UT. We put up 17 runs on one team in the first inning with no outs. I regretted some of the games I scheduled but I didn't know how good we were and was going to make sure we had wins. I think this coming year the fielders may be great players but will they gel and work together for success. Will they still be using the first 4/5 weeks to figure out who plays where and with who. I had a friend who coached HS ball and didn't win a game and tried to use the we played a tough schedule excuse. My answer to him was if you don't schedule some guaranteed wins you deserve to be fired. I think Iona and RI were guaranteed wins while they figured it out last year. Plus you have to remember we were starting 3 new guys on the mound as weekend starters and didn't know they would be as good as they were, and I think those weekends helped them have overall success. If they had been busts, we would have been using those weekends to figure out who next. As OT says, Iona only kept 12 players from the year before and 1 starter. We had no idea they would be as bad as they were. When they were scheduled, they were a decent team. RI is up and down every year.