The Club Baseball team competed on the Wood Wars tournament from Friday, Nov. 1 to Sunday, Nov. 3. Their first opponent was Texas A&M on Friday, Nov. 1 and the team won that match (2-1). Game two was against the University of Kansas on Saturday, Nov. 2 and the Gorillas won that game as well (2-0). The third came of the tournament was also on Saturday and it was against Houston Community College. The team won that game (7-0). The last two games were on Sunday, Nov. 3. The first one was against the University of Texas-San Antonio and the Gorillas won (1-0). The last and final game for Pitt State’s Club Baseball team was against the Texas Tech Raiders and the team lost that game (5-2).
Club President Drew Roy was pleased with the overall turnout of the competition.
“It was definitely a great weekend,” Roy said. “We played some very strong competition. The team definitely showed up to play.”
There were a couple of things that Roy saw that the team did well.
“Our pitching and defense were both phenomenal,” Roy said. “I think we gave (six) runs across the entire tournament and (five) of those were in the championship game. But defense was great. The only thing, probably, we struggled with was the offense…”
One member of the team stood out to Roy during the tournament.
“I’d just like to throw in (and) give a shout out to Jacob Galbraith,” Roy said. “The guy threw eleven innings in the semifinals, complete game shutout. He was perfect through seven and unfortunately, we couldn’t get him a run in regulation to get him that perfect game. But he was absolutely phenomenal on the mound in the semi-finals.”
The difference between last year’s Wood Wars tournament and this years showed a lot of growth in the team.
“… This is the end of our fall (semester) here, so we’ll being going into the spring. Overall, I think we played pretty well. We saw a lot of good things. Last year when we went down to Wood Wars, we felt like it showed that our team had a lot of holes and this year we came away with going like, ‘wow, we’re pretty good.’ There’s not very many things we can just look and say, ‘this is gonna be a problem.”
These were the last games of the fall semester for Club Baseball.
“Well, we’re gonna practice probably one night a week until the end of the semester,” Roy said. “Just kind of keep the guys together. We want to give guys time away especially… getting here to the end of the semester. We’ll take Christmas break off, everybody will go home, do whatever they need to do, and we’ll get back together right as soon as the semester starts. (We will) ramp back up practice (and) really start working on things at that point. We open up with a big-time conference opponent in Truman State. I know they were 11 and four in the conference we move into, in Division I, this year. So, they’ll be a tough opponent. So, we’ll have to make sure we’re doing everything we get to do over the off season to be ready and come out and start hot.”
There were many new players on the team this semester and Roy is proud of how far the team has come since they started the semester.
“(We have improved) tremendously,” Roy said. “We started a lot of new faces on this group… We got some guys come out high school… and it’s an adjustment period. Some guys had to come in and say, ‘Wow. This competition level is better than I expected.’ Other guys had to really focus on themselves and work on themselves and make sure they were ready to play. I think I’ve seen a lot of good things from the team as a whole. We’ve definitely, definitely improved from the start of the fall.”