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| Lee Walker
August 6, 2012
1:26:11 PM
Entry #: 3958142
| A shorthanded crew from Florence Post 11 headed out to Troy University at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, August 2nd. We arrived in time to get checked-in to our dorms and get settled in before we were scheduled to have practice. We were lucky to be assigned to the Trojan Village dorms, as they are the nicest ones we've ever stayed in there.
We had a very spirited practice, even though we only had 10 players there, 9 active players as Cody Berry was injured. Each player was able to get in a LOT of swings in the 3 cages during our 45 minutes of cage time. Then, we had our 45 minutes on the field.
Our infield/outfield practice on the field was amazing. We had guys in the outfield making catches on balls they haven't gotten to all season, and our infielders were spectacular. We rarely bobbled a ball, or made an errant throw.
If we could've only played our first game on Thursday night!! Because, our first round opponent (Decatur) would've had to hit HRs in order to beat us that night with the way we were playing defense.
After practice we went back to the dorms and got cleaned up and went to dinner/supper at Half Shell (Oyster Bar). Michael Walker got Oysters Rockefellow (oysters with spinach & cheese on top), and Darrin Berry got a dozen raw oysters. Ewwwwwwwwww is all I'm going to say, haha. The Half Shell has a large menu, with basically any kind of food someone would want. Everyone had a great dinner and good camaraderie.
Now, for the rest of the story. The sun did rise on Friday. We didn't play until 7:30 Friday night, with batting practice at 6:15. That made for a fairly long day. Plans to go watch the Batman movie dissipated as the guys preferred to simply hang out at the dorms.
During the afternoon, Cam, Houston, Ethan, & Logan all made their arrivals to give us the full contingency that we were going to battle with.
At 4:00, most everyone went over to watch the Tuscaloosa/Dothan game. Around 5:30ish, our clan went back to the dorm to get ready for our game. We showed up by 6:15 for BP, and had a solid round.
The Tuscaloosa vs Dothan game ended fairly early, leaving us quite a bit of time until we started. We felt this was a good thing, because it gave us an opportunity to get our guys starting in the OF some practice on the turf since none of 'em had been able to make it for practice on Thursday.
Then, 7:30 came and the game started. All that had seemed well going in quickly evaporated. We did hit 2 or 3 balls on the nose in the top of the 1st inning, but they were right at the Decatur defense. In the bottom of the 1st they challenged us to make a play on the move, which we didn't make, and they capitalized and ended up scoring 2 runs.
We came in and scored a couple of runs in the top of the 2nd to tie it up. However, Decatur came right back and scored a couple more runs in the 2nd to regain the lead. Decatur wasn't clicking on all cylinders by any stretch of the imagination. We politely gave them 5 runs in the first 3 innings, as we weren't clicking any hardly any cylinders.
By the end of the game, we had committed 7 errors, which was not the recipe we had counted on using. We eventually lost the game 12-4, along with having another player go down with an injury.
Nick Isbell was injured sliding in at home, his shoulder banged against the pitchers knee, causing him great discomfort following the collision. He had to be removed from the game later and wasn't available to play on Saturday either. Also, another of our already shorthanded crew left us after Friday night's game headed to the great northeast corner of our country (New Hampshire).
These occurrences left us with only 11 healthy players for Saturday's game against Dothan. We had Logan on the mound and he did an outstanding job battling those guys. Their lineup is relentless, 1 thru 9. They managed to get 1 run in the bottom of the 1st, then they put a 4 spot on the board in the 2nd. They slowed their attack down until the 5th, when they put 4 more on the board. With Adam in the field, and knowing he needs a lil bit of time to get warmed up to pitch. we didn't get him in there until the 6th inning, when we were already down 10-0. Dothan added a couple of insurance runs in the 6th to take a 12-0 lead into the 7th. We were unable to muster up much of a rally and we fell by the final score of 12-0.
As noted earlier, we went thru the postseason shorthanded due to injury Murphy's groin still hasn't recovered, Joe's shoulder (rotator), Cody's broken collarbone. We also were short a couple of other players for the state due to vacation and just not showing up.
We also found out once we got to Troy that Ethan's mom was having a pretty serious operation in Nashville on Thursday. She came thru the operation fine, left her extremely sore though.
So, considering all the obstacles that we encountered, I was proud of the accomplishments this group made. As I told everyone on Sunday afternoon at Birmingham Southern, nobody else in the state expected us to win our way back to Troy.
However, this group kept our streak alive of at least making it to Troy and finish in the Top 4.
From the 18 man roster that we submitted back on July 1st, 15 players will be eligible to come back and play with us again next season. This is by far the youngest group I've had since 2003 (when we were older, but, had several who had already graduated high school but were young enough 19 year olds to come back and play after their freshman season in college).
Whereas, this year's squad is/was made up of a LOT of underclassmen, we do have a couple of guys who graduated who will be able to come back next season, Josh & Logan to provide some veteran leadership that is greatly needed on these types of teams.
I hope everyone enjoyed your summer and benefitted greatly by playing for and representing Florence Post 11 with such great class.
To ALL of our parents, you guys were first class fans all summer long. You have no idea how much I appreciate that. You have done your part to continue to carry on Florence Post 11's reputation of bringing a 1st Class fan base to the parks throughout the summer. THANK YOU!!
Until we see each other again,
Lee
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