Bobcats dominate at home

Hundreds of fans have crowded John Kurtz baseball field the past two and a half weeks to watch GCSU baseball players play a 14 game homestand.

The Bobcats (40-7) currently stand at the top of the Peach Belt Conference with a conference record of 16-5. The team is ranked second in the nation behind the University of Tampa. The 14-game home stand started out with a 7-3 win against Erskine College on April 4 and will end on Sunday, April 23 against conference rival UNC Pembroke.

Players look forward to the chance to play at home and have fan support cheering them on during games.

“We played a lot of away games early in the season,” said freshman infielder Chris Marler. “We are fortunate that we have had the homestand in this month, when its nice out and we can get a couple hundred fans out to watch the games. It’s been a long time coming since we played so many away games.”

Junior catcher Nick Waldrip also said the team has been extremely lucky to have such a long home stand so late in the season.

“(We are) real lucky because playing at home is a lot easier than playing on the road,” said Waldrip. “It helps our game- gets us on a good roll before play offs.”

The Bobcats are on their way, going almost undefeated in the games played during the homestand thus far, losing only to Lander University.

There are many advantages for players when so many games are played at home so late in the season. Numerous players said they don’t miss as much class and they have a support system from GCSU fans that come out to watch games.

“It’s a tougher schedule when on the road playing games,” said junior infielder Bryan Shaughnessy. “At home, we go to class and tend to start concentrating on school a little bit more.”

In addition, the Bobcats have the home field advantage of playing on a field they are accustomed to. They practice on the John Kurtz field for approximately two hours every day, so the field becomes a comfort zone.

The comfort zone of playing on their own field helps players to not worry about other teams in their conference. Players said all the teams in the conference are good, so they tend to worry about themselves more than any other team.

“(We) mainly (worry about) ourselves because we control our own destiny, first and foremost we have to win conference before we worry about other teams outside of our conference,” said Kolve.

Next year the team will look forward to another two or three week homestand.

“Every year we try for a nice homestand in the middle to late part of the season, where you give your kids a couple weeks at home,” said head coach Chris Calciano.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 21 2006. Filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry