WNCC baseball team opens regional playoffs at home

For the second straight season, the Western Nebraska Community College baseball team will open the Region IX playoffs at home.

Last year, the Cougars faced Northeastern Junior College in the first round of the playoffs at home, before falling in two straight games. This season, the Cougars also earned the right to play at home after finishing second in the Empire Conference with a 16-14 record, just a game ahead of third place Trinidad State Junior College.

WNCC and Trinidad State will open the best two of three series on Friday at Cleveland Field. First pitch is slated for 1 p.m. for the 9-inning contest. The series will continue Saturday and if necessary on Sunday with those games beginning at 1 p.m.

The other first-round regional contest has Lamar Community College (43-10) hosting McCook Community College (29-26). The two winners of the first round contests will meet each other in the best 2 of 3 championship series next week at the site of the higher seed.

WNCC coach Mike Jones said for his team to make that championship series, they have to pitch and play good defense.

“It will be important for us to continue to pitch and play good defense,” he said. “We haven’t been a real explosive offense throughout the season, so we definitely will rely on pitching and defense. I expect them to be close games. When you extend from seven inning to nine inning games, it usually comes down to your bullpen.”

Tim Beard, the freshman from Canberra, Australia, will get the nod on the mound to open the series. The last time Beard stepped on the pitcher’s rubber, Beard shutdown Trinidad’s bats a week ago for a 4-2 on Saturday, which gave the Cougars the No. 2 seed.

In that contest, Beard tossed a 3-hitter, while striking out seven and walking just one. Beard closed out the game in dramatic fashion as he recorded five strike outs in the final nine outs.

“Tim has been outstanding for us throughout the season,” Jones said. “He has been real good for us in conference play. We need another good outing out of Tim and we expect to get a good outing out of Tim.”

WNCC won the series against Trinidad 4-2 as they earned 7-3, 1-0 and 10-6 wins on the road before topping the Trojans last Saturday. The way the Cougars earned the victories was through manufacturing runs, something that Jones said is important for this team.

“We have to find ways to score runs and what I mean by that is we need to get creative,” he said. “We have to steal some bases, bunt some guys over, do some hit and run, and try to take some extra bases when the defense isn’t expecting. We really have to get creative and find ways to get guys in scoring position and then come up with those big hits when we need to.”

WNCC has been playing their best ball during the last half of the season. The Cougars enter the tournament with a 22-34 record. But, that is after they started the season 0-9 and 1-13 through February. Since then, the Cougar men are playing .500 baseball at 21-21.

One of the reasons of the recent success is the team has settled down defensively.

“We made some defensive changes and they seem to be working out just fine,” he said. “We have been playing really good defense and we hope that continues because that will be real important.”

The key, though, is getting that first win to take that must-win mentality from the back of the player’s minds.

“If you win the first one I think it will take some pressure off and allow the guys to maybe relax a little bit,” he said. “But, it will be intense all the way through. I definitely think it will be a little easier with more productive at bats once that pressure is off a little bit.”

The winner of the Region IX tournament will host the district playoffs May 20-23. Lamar Community College has earned an automatic berth into the district tournament, so if Lamar wins its games this weekend, the winner of this weekend’s WNCC and Trinidad match-up also will go. The only thing up for stake in that championship game is where the district tournament will be played as Region IX will send two teams to the district playoffs.