Entry #25 - 4/5/04

On the day of the NCAA basketball championship, I wonder what is going through the minds of Paul Hewitt, head coach at Georgia Tech, and Jim Calhoun, head coach at UConn. A win tonight will make basketball history and place them among the elite. I sure would like to be in the lockeroom to hear the pre-game talks to their teams. How exciting would it be to run out of that tunnel and onto the court for this game? I get “goose bumps” just thinking about it. This is going to be a great week. Championship basketball games. Major League Baseball is underway. Just think, until November, there will be college or professional baseball games on television every night. My wife just loves that. The Master’s golf tournament is this weekend. We have an extra hour of daylight. The weather is finally warming up and my son’s first Tee Ball practice is this week. Should be exciting. Let me catch you up on our season.

We have just completed our halfway point in our conference schedule. No doubt our second half needs to be better than our first. We have put ourselves in a tough situation, but it is not an impossible situation. I’m no different than most coaches, I feel like we have lost some games that we should have won. At Elon we lost two out of three and both of those games were one run losses. In both those games we had many opportunities to put those games away but came up empty. For the series, Elon had ten two-out RBIs, while we had zero. That was the difference in the series. In one of those losses we left ten men stranded in scoring position. In our victory, Tim Turner gave us a great outing and he combined with Josh Kite, Trevor Smith and Caleb Moore to hold the Phoenix to seven hits. Meanwhile, Andy Howdeshell and Caleb Moore paced us offensively with two hits apiece and 5 RBIs. ‘Howdie” got us going early with a three run blast in the first inning.

Mother Nature washed out our midweek game at UNC Asheville and we went one and two versus Western Carolina this past weekend. We lost the first two games of the series by identical scores of 8-4. Again we had opportunities, but mostly Western simply outplayed us. In game three, Steven Calicutt came to our rescue and gave us one of his best outings of his career and he held the Catamounts to two runs over seven innings. This was a must win and I was glad to see we finally got some clutch hits. Freshman David Yates had a big RBI driving in Josiah Glafenhein to get us on the board in the fourth. Jo-Jo would later double, scoring Andy Howdeshell to tie the game at two apiece. In the seventh, junior Justin Clear led off the inning with a clutch single. After a Matt Traylor sacrifice and a Shane Byrne walk, Caleb Moore drove in the go ahead run with a fielder’s choice. “Howdie” then singled to left and Steven Douglas delivered a clutch two-out base hit to give us some insurance. Freshman right-hander Brandon Summey gave us a scoreless eighth, and Caleb Moore pitched the ninth to pick up his fifth save of the year. Josiah Glafenhein had a monster of a weekend going 7-for-11, with 5 RBIs, 2 home runs, a double and a stolen base.

There is no doubt that Sunday was a must-win for our ball club and we hope that we broke the seal for getting some clutch hits. Once again our offensive numbers are pretty good, with seven of our nine regulars in our lineup hitting over .300. The most frustrating part from a coaching standpoint has been our lack of ability to hit with runners in scoring position. In our last six conference games we have gone 2-and-4. In those six games, we have hit a paltry .213 (13 for 61) with runners in scoring position. Our pitching and defense has not been great, but for the most part it has been good enough to win. I look back and if we just get a few more timely hits, we would be in the top of the standings. Being a “clutch performer” cannot be taught. It has to come from inside. In the second half of our season we need some “clutch performers”. There is no use in crying over spilled milk. We have some big games ahead of us and most of our goals we set at the beginning of the season can still be accomplished. Tomorrow we will have a team meeting and re-evaluate those goals and re-set them if necessary.

As a coach when we don’t win games I think we should, I pull my hair out trying to figure why. I really like our ball club and think by tournament time we can be very dangerous. But if we don’t start coming to play every single day, then our tournament hopes will be washed away. After a sleepless night on Saturday, and going over every piece of data our club has produced, I finally put a finger on what has been one the major causes for us not putting a bunch of wins together. What separates our team from the teams at the top of our league, or even the teams at the top of the national polls, or the teams in the higher profile conferences like the SEC or ACC? Physically, our players match up with the players in these programs. When it comes to speed, strength, how hard you throw, bat speed, etc., we are as good as anybody. The difference is that at the top, the players “bring it to the yard” every single day. What I mean is that the best players/pitchers don’t take days off. They play and produce at a high level every single day. Sure a hitter at an SEC school may go 0-for-4 one day, but usually in that 0-for-4 there were two good at bats and maybe some hard hit balls. And you better believe the odds of that same player going 0-for-4 the next day are very slim. The top pitchers in winning programs may have a tough outing once out of about every eight or nine starts. And in that tough outing they may have gotten hit around a little bit, but it probably won’t happen the next time he takes the mound.

We have many hitters who have good numbers. But our typical series this year has gone this way. I’ll give you an example. We may win one of the games in the series by a comfortable margin. In this game we may have a player who has a great game and goes 4-for-5. Now we end up losing the other two games of the series by a close margin and in those games the same player goes 0-for-4 and 0-for-4 and fails to get that clutch hit. When the weekend is over that player has gone 4 for 13 (.308 average) and feels like he had a decent weekend, when in all reality he hasn’t come through when his team really needed him. The same goes for pitchers. We have yet to have two pitchers win on the same weekend. At times our starting pitchers have been dominant, but they haven’t been able to do it on the same weekend. The same has been for our bullpen. A pitcher has one good relief appearance and then struggles in his next.

So it is obvious the consistency of playing at a high level is what separates the good from average and the best from the good. That is why in baseball or in any profession, if you don’t “bring it to the yard” every single day, you can get beat. Baseball is a “contagiously” skilled sport. It just takes a couple of guys to get it going and it rubs off on the next. As our numbers indicate, we have many players having good, solid seasons. But we need them to get contagious. On game day we need seven of the nine hitters in our lineup that day to “bring it to the yard”, instead of two or three of the nine. The college season is just too short to take games off.

So as we head down the back stretch, I’m confident our guys will grasp this concept. It doesn’t have to be the same guy every game, but when the situation arises, we need that player to come through. Make the big play, make the big pitch or get the big hit. All the former athletes out there reading this, look back on your career and what do you remember? That’s right, the big plays, the big shots, the big hits, the big victories.

When we lost a heartbreaker a couple of Sunday’s ago to UNCG, the guys didn’t hang around the clubhouse very long after the game. Thus we were left with some extra food in the clubhouse. This time it happened to be pizza, so instead of letting it go to waste I decided to take it to a local inner city recreation department and give it to the kids. I had about 15 pizzas with me. I walked in and asked the gentleman that was in charge if it was alright to give these pizzas to the kids. He said sure and immediately I was swarmed by youngsters. The man took all but three of the pizzas into a back room where the children began to eat and I carried the other three into the gymnasium. In the gym there were maybe ten young boys, no older than twelve playing basketball. They immediately stopped the game when they saw me with the pizzas and one of them asked who the pizzas were for. I introduced myself and told them I would give all three pizzas to the first person who made a shot from between half court and the top of the key.

Immediately, they all were screaming wildly to see who could go first. All except one boy in the back. He just stood there looking at the hoop. So I asked him what his name was. He told me it was Marquis. I decided to give Marquis the first shot at the pizzas. The other kids seemed a little upset and were moaning that Marquis was getting the first shot. Marquis grabbed the ball, walked onto the court, asked if this was the spot and proceeded to drain about a 25 footer. When the ball went in the other kids were upset, so I told them there was pizza in the back room. They took off running for the pizza. Marquis then confidently walked over to me and said, “Thanks for the pizzas, Coach. My Mama is going to be happy tonight.” I congratulated him on the shot and as I handed him the pizzas he looked at me and said, “I always make big shots.” I thought to myself, “Yes you do Marquis. And I bet it won’t be the last.” He then sprinted for the door to take dinner home to his family. Until Next Time….

Coach Skole