Published: May 12, 2008 10:46 pm      

Mountain Lions seek to regain touch

ATHENS — It’s all about putting the magic back on the diamond for the Concord University baseball team this week.

The Mountain Lions are one of 48 teams still alive in NCAA Division II baseball, after receiving a bid for the North Atlantic Region baseball tournament in Johnstown, Pa. Concord (35-13), seeded third, plays Pitt-Johnstown (35-17-1) at Point Stadium at 7 p.m. Thursday.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is, this doesn’t happen every year,” Concord head coach Kevin Garrett said Monday about the regional bid. “It’s a great accomplishment.”

After winning 35 games and rising to No. 12 in the national rankings, the Mountain Lions have lost their last four games — two to end the regular season against rival West Virginia State, and the next two in the West Virginia Conference Tournament on May 2-3.

Garrett said that in the tournament, “the thing that hurt us was, we played tight. We hadn’t done that all year. We are a young team, and we played like a young team.

“We put pressure on ourselves when we didn’t need to — which was very uncharacteristic of this team. Usually they’re a pretty loose team. They go into a game knowing what they’ve got to do. We have a game plan going in.

“We just pressed to do things that are not characteristic of us as a team. That’s what we’ve got to stay away from.”

He cited a fielding example. “My infielder made a great play, and we had a double-play situation, where all he had to do was pitch the ball to the shortstop. But he tried to dive for the bag to touch it with his glove,” Garrett said.

“We didn’t get the double play. … Two runs scored after that.”

Garrett said the last weekend series with West Virginia State “had some effect” on Concord’s performance in the conference tourney. “We had a goal to win the division, and once that goal was not attainable anymore, mentally that’s tough,” he said.

Against State, he said, “we didn’t play very well. We didn’t pitch very well. Going into those games, we knew that’s a very good-hitting team. If we don’t pitch well and if we don’t hit well, we’re going to be in trouble. You’ve got to pitch well to win tournaments. Period.”

Simplifying the game to its fundamentals, Garrett has told his players, “Just make routine plays — the great ones will come. I’ll take a single in a situation when the bases are loaded. It doesn’t have to be a double or a grand slam.

“I think we just had guys trying to play above where we’d played all year. Obviously, the recipe we used got us 35 wins to begin with, so we want to get back to that. ... We got out of character. What we’ve tried to do (in) the last two weeks of practice is to get back into character.”

That meant wholesale changes in the practice routine, emphasizing live hitting, game situations and switching the order in which things like batting practice were scheduled.

“We were trying to give them a fresh approach,” he said, “a new perspective, so to speak. I think they’ve responded really well.”

“Our philosophies are still there; we didn’t change that,” Garrett said. “We just changed how we went about practice. We wanted to make sure we got something out of practice every day.”

Another change has been working baseball around semester exams. Garrett said he worked out a plan with other university officials so the baseball players could finish their tests by this evening. The team plans to leave for Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

“The pressure’s there,” Garrett said. “We’ve pushed practice all the way to the evening. We don’t practice anywhere near finals time. ... They are student-athletes. We want to make sure they’re eligible next year, and that they’re making progress toward their degree.”

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Coming in Wednesday’s Daily Telegraph: a preview of the regional tournament game with Pitt-Johnstown.