ETSU basketball mismanaged its way into a defeat at the hands of Iona in the CIT semifinals. Granted, this was an excellent Iona team, but I will never stop pointing out the six seconds that ticked off the clock while ETSU's front court sat on its hands. That situation right there cost that team the game. I hate the fact that fouling is utilized as a defensive strategy, but it's a fact of life, and they need to utilize it in a situation like that. Nobody on the floor was in foul trouble at the time, and you're only down by a point. If you have enough time after the free throws, you can get the ball in Mike Smith's hands and let your best player win you the game. I guess we'll never know what he could have done, and he'll fall just 18 points short of Tom Chilton at 6th on the all-time scoring list.
At the very least, Zeke broke the single-season record set by Zakee Wadood for blocks. He's chasing the all-time mark now, and it's well within his reach if he stays healthy his senior year.
In baseball, the Bucs exploded for a 10-run eighth inning in the opener against Florida Gulf Coast. Bo Burton actually picked up a save in that game, coming in with the tying run aboard in the top of the eighth after a great start from John Long. The Eagles then bounced back with a blowout win thanks to five errors yesterday. They're just under way as I type this. Bo Reeder has exploded in this series and reached 200 hits. He's hitting a sensational .356 and slugging a sensational .723. He leads the team in homers with TEN, and is second in RBIs with 32 (Pratt has 34). With the team hitting .310 and scoring 163 runs, the offense is great, and despite the enormous ERA numbers from the pitching staff, the staff has been okay. The issue has been defense. ETSU's .949 defense is the worst in the Atlantic Sun. Kerry Doane has 13 errors already, and is fielding a very poor .888. Reeder, for all his offensive prowess and mound dominance, is fielding an atrocious .830 with nine errors. Niesman is fielding .899 with nine bloopers of his own. Those numbers simply have to get better if this team wants to be better than a game above .500 in conference play. The A-Sun is simply too good not to exploit that kind of defense. We saw it on full display yesterday.
Softball has... well, it hasn't been pretty. Whitney Kiihnl was expected to dominate this team, and she did. And so did JJ Nelson. And Sarah Sigrest. And Olivia Kline, who threw the first complete game no-hitter in the history of Betty Basler Field (Shelby Morris and Marissa Hardy had combined for a perfect game previously). With the exception of two big wins against a very bad Belmont team and a promising start against a poor Appalachian State squad that got washed out before being made official, the squad has really struggled. The big sore spot hasn't been the offense, which is actually pretty average relative to other A-Sun teams (the bats are actually better than Lipscomb's on paper), but rather the defense. All of it.
The fielding defense is tenth in the conference in errors (56, ahead of Campbell) and fielding percentage (.941, ahead of Belmont). The pitching staff is last in A-Sun in runs allowed (206), earned runs (151), walks (121), doubles allowed (45), and homers allowed (39). They're also 10th in batting average against (.284, ahead of Belmont), and hit batters (23, ahead of Jacksonville).
The pitching struggles could not have been put on display any better than they were yesterday in the second game of the North Florida series. With two outs in her pocket in the top of the seventh and looking to close out a fantastic performance in which she had given up only one run on three hits, Morris came unraveled. I could spend hours trying to find the eloquence to describe this sequence of pitches, but I think I'll just do it this way and let you imagine how this went down:
Fielders Choice P to 3B (2 outs)
Wild pitch (Runners at second and third)
Wild pitch (R, 2-2)
Walk
Duncan to P for Morris
HBP (Bases Loaded)
Walk (R, 3-2 UNF)
Morris to P for Duncan
Walk (R, 4-2 UNF)
Walk (R, 5-2 UNF)
Wolff to P for Morris
Ground out to SS
Four runs on no hits, no errors, three left on base.
This reminds me of something Keanu Reeves said in The Replacements. To paraphrase:
Something goes wrong. And you try to fight against it, but then another thing goes wrong. And another. And another. And the harder you fight against it, the faster you sink, until you're in over your head, just like quicksand.
There's a lot of truth in that (not just in sports, but in life, although that's beyond our context on BB:BE). It happened to Jean Van de Velde in the 1999 British Open, and this collapse by Morris was every bit as painful to watch. I recognize that pitchers are competitive and want to win games on their own, but if you're having a hard time hitting your spots down low, you have to throw the batters something they can put in play and put some trust in your defense. Even if you have to throw it right down the middle, you're pitching to the bottom of the order and it's not prudent to try to dance around them.
There are moments that define your season, for better or worse. This is one of those moments for Brad Irwin's squad. When they put themselves in a great position to win games, clicking on all cylinders, Murphy's Law kicks in and they get saddled with a loss when they should have had a win. Still, this team can't give up on their season just yet. They still have a chance for a sweep against Stetson next weekend, and then again when they take on Mercer later. If they can play .500 in conference the rest of the way, they have a good shot at making the conference tournament, and anything can happen once you get there.
Men's soccer is in action today. They took on Lincoln Memorial earlier, and will play Milligan at 6:30 tonight in the final home game of their spring season.
And before I forget (because they deserve far more coverage than I have given them this year), big congratulations are in order t
o the men's and women's tennis squads. The men wrapped up at least a share of the regular season title yet again with UNF (it's an outright title if Jacksonville beats UNF on April 10). The women wrapped up the outright regular season crown with their win over Mercer yesterday. Both teams finished 9-1 in regular season play and will gear up for the Atlantic Sun tournaments in sunny DeLand, Florida. After my recent clashes with the weather out at Basler Field, I don't blame them for heading south.
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