Entry #69 - 2/28/08

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when all the days are all twilight, when you need it the most, it stops. It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart."
- A. Bartlett Giamatti - The Green Fields of the Mind

The above quote really sums up the anticipation of baseball season. If you look at a calendar of a coach, one day that is always highlighted is “Opening Day”. For a college coach, every day prior to “Opening Day” is meticulously planned and organized in order to be prepared for this specific date. Although, it can still be very cold outside when college baseball begins, to most of us, “Opening Day” is the official start of spring. The day represents a newness that is like no other day. There's that little extra excitement, a faster beating of the heart. You have that anxiety because you want to get off to a good start, for yourself and for your team. I believe Joe DiMaggio described it best when he said, “You look forward to it like a birthday party when you're a kid. You think something wonderful is going to happen.” Well that was definitely the feeling we had as we loaded the bus and headed south to Auburn University for our first games of 2008. We were excited that something wonderful was going to happen.

We were able to practice at Auburn on Thursday night but due to some poor weather we were forced to workout indoors. This was not a big deal because we just wanted to be able to work out the kinks of a long bus ride by taking some batting practice and moving around a little bit. I was amazed that when we unloaded all of our gear, that we had not forgotten one thing. This was amazing. Surely someone would forget something, but not this year. I thought maybe this was going to be a sign of good things to come.

After a night of tossing and turning, I awoke to the sight of blue skies and sunshine. Mother Nature had moved all the inclement weather out of town and the forecast was going to be great for the rest of the weekend. We loaded the bus and headed to the field ready to get the 2008 season underway.

Auburn has a beautiful stadium and a great atmosphere for college baseball. We had tried to prepare our guys for the big crowd and my goal for our players was to remain poised no mater what happened; whether it good or bad. Throughout the series we seemed to struggle with this. Which in turn ended up leading to our lack of execution in many areas. All weekend long we made the game of baseball very difficult on ourselves. Now don’t get me wrong, the Auburn Tigers had a lot to do with us not executing. I must give Tom Slater and his coaching staff a lot of credit because they did a great job of applying pressure to us every inning of every game. Whether it was their pitchers pounding the strike zone, their hitters being aggressive or them defending the field, they seemed to keep the heat turned up all weekend long. I felt like I was trying to drink coffee with a fork. And to be honest, I knew Auburn was going to be good and present a difficult challenge for us, but after watching them play for four days, I came away even more impressed by their club. I sincerely believe they are going to have a very good season. They have a lot of weapons.

Obviously starting our season with four consecutive losses was not what we wanted, but in our case, I am hoping that in a month from now we can look back on this opening weekend and say we really learned a lot about ourselves and although it was difficult to swallow, those losses helped us get on track. At times during the weekend we did do some things very well and certain individuals really performed at a high level. But we were also exposed in many areas individually and as a team. These are the areas where we must improve. We had a lot of players who were playing their first games at the Division I level and I sincerely believe that this weekend’s experience will be a great learning tool for them.

When you get smacked in the mouth like we did, how you respond is so important. Our coaching staff was frustrated and upset about our performance, but we also saw many areas which can easily be improved. We thought we were prepared to play better. Our guys need to just keep working hard and keep making adjustments. If they do this, I think we will be fine. If you ask my players, they will tell you I’m not a big proponent of feeling sorry for yourself. I call it the P-L-O-ME. (Poor-Little-Ole-ME) Disease. So much of your success in this game will depend on how you handle adversity and for some of our young players; they haven’t had to deal with this very much at the lower levels. Now it comes to the forefront and it is going to be so important to their development as a ball player.

This weekend we play our first Atlantic Sun Conference series versus USC Upstate. It is definitely going to be another challenge. I sure would like to have a few more games under our belt before we begin conference play, but that is out of our control, so no need to worry about it. I know our kids are excited to get back on the field again and it will be nice to be at home. Our focus will remain on being fundamentally sound and taking care of the little things. We’ll see if we learned anything from last weekend.

Until Next Time…

COACH SKOLE