The coveted Friday night starting spot is up for grabs for the Iowa baseball pitching staff.

Sophomore Jack Dreyer held the position in the shortened 2020 season, going 2-1 with a 3.32 ERA and 23 strikeouts before the season was canceled because of COVID-19.

Dreyer was slated to return this season, but went down with elbow injury in the fall and will be out for the entire 2021 season. He also suffered a shoulder injury in 2019, which sidelined him for the majority of the 2019 season.

“Super disappointing and super sad for Jack,” head coach Rick Heller said Friday at the team’s media day. “He had done everything right – worked his tail off all summer, was in tremendous shape, and then he basically threw a real short simulated game early in the fall his first time out and had some discomfort.

“We lose our potential No. 1 starter, one of the best arms in the country, before the season starts.”

But Iowa baseball has some other options to fill the gap left by Dreyer.

Junior left-handed pitcher and left fielder Trenton Wallace has emerged as the frontrunner to take the mound on Friday night in Iowa’s first series of the season against Michigan on March 6-8 in Round Rock, Texas.

Wallace is also one of the team’s best hitters, and will start at left field in the games he doesn’t pitch. In the 2020 season, he started six games, hitting .529 in 17 appearances at the plate. Wallace also went 1-0 on the mound with a 1.59 ERA, striking out 18 batters in 11 ⅓ innings.

Sophomore right-handed pitcher Drew Irvine, who went 1-2 with a 4.50 ERA in the 2020 season, is also an option for Heller. But Irvine is out because of COVID-19 protocols, which will sideline him until just days before the team departs for Texas.

Iowa baseball paused in-person activities on Feb. 17 after four players tested positive for COVID-19. The rest of the team resumed practices on Feb. 23, but those four will need to be out for at least 17 days and complete a heart screening before they can resume activities, per Big Ten conference COVID-19 protocols.

“[The pause] definitely set us back at a really rough time, especially when the pitchers are building,” Heller said. “And you don’t want to have to start over there while the ramp up was going really, really well.”

But no matter who takes the mound on Friday nights, the team is confident in its deep pitching staff.

“We have a quality group of guys who could all potentially fill in that role on Friday night and give us a chance to win the game every time,” Wallace said. “That’s the biggest thing for us – we’re really pushing each other to be the Friday guy, but even through only one person’s going to be able to throw that game, I believe we’ve got three or four, maybe even five guys that could potentially start or throw in the game on Friday.”