Game 2: Western Carolina 11, Georgia Southern 4
Western Carolina
Head Coach Bobby Moranda
Opening Statement... “Today was all about Matt Benedict for me. He commanded three or four pitches and really competed and set the tone for us. Offensively, I was proud of our approach off of Brown today, a guy who threw really well against us during the year. I thought we had a much better approach against him today. “
On Importance of added-on runs... “In tournament play, you never know what is going to happen?everyone is here to win a championship so the add-on runs are huge, no doubt. We were still running and hit and running, trying to do some things to get at least one run an inning. I believe we had two big innings”
On Matt Benedict... “I’m very proud of him. He has developed over the last three years into a number one guy. We saw this coming last year. He’s a hard worker. The way he threw the ball today is the way he’s thrown the ball consistently all year long. He’s been our most consistent guy. Our guys play with confidence behind him.”
Junior Pitcher Matt Benedict
On feeling pressure in the tournament setting... “It’s really something I try not to think too much about because I really just try to throw like it’s any other game in the season. I try to keep the same mind frame as every other start. Every day is a different day. I just try to stay consistent.”
On the wind blowing out... “It doesn’t really affect me because I usually get a lot of ground balls, so I’m kind of happy to see the wind blowing out so maybe my hitters can hit the ball, so it doesn’t really affect me on the defensive side too much.”
Junior Infielder Matt Johns
On the offense... “I think today we were seeing the ball well and coming off a good series against Davidson. We were able to sit back and drive the ball the other way and see a lot of pitches, and put a lot of pressure on the defense.”
Georgia Southern Eagles
Head Coach Rodney Hennon
Opening statement... “The bottom line is that they played better baseball than we did today. To play well in this tournament, you have to pitch and you have to play defense. We just weren’t real sharp today. To be honest, we didn’t look like we were ready to play today, and as a head coach, that’s my responsibility to get our team ready to play. Maybe I did a poor job of getting us prepared today, because we didn’t play well.”
On tomorrow... “It’s survival now. Once you put yourself in that losers’ bracket, you just have to go out and play hard and get after it and find a way to make it to the next day. In order to do that, we’re going to have to come with a little more energy tomorrow as a team and just go out and pitch and make plays and get some timely hits to give ourselves an opportunity to win.”
On the offense... “We didn’t really get the big hits. To Western’s credit, Benedict made some pitches when he had to and they made the play. You’ve got to make the routine plays and you’ve got to be able to make the pitches in situations when you need to and they did a better job of that today than we did.”