The Oklahoma Christian University baseball team opened their season last week in a three game series against St. Mary’s University. The Eagles unfortunately only won one out of the three games after losing the final game in extra innings.
Freshman Kohl Kirby gave his thoughts on the upcoming 2021 season.
“Since this is my first year of college sports I’m just looking forward to that next level of competition and getting to develop,” Kirby said.
Like all sports teams the Eagles baseball team has had to overcome obstacles regarding COVID-19 issues, but other than that the Eagles just need to put all the pieces in the right place.
“I think our biggest obstacle will be putting everything together,” Kirby said. “We have all the talent we need, we just have to put it together.”
Scheduling games has never been harder for schools considering all the precautions taken due to COVID-19. However, the show must go on. This means the Eagles will play most of their opponents in a three game series rather than a four game series.
Kirby spoke about the reasons behind this scheduling.
“Playing three games means we’ll get to use our best pitching in a really efficient way and the workload on the weekends won’t be as much,” Kirby said. “It will also mean less conference games, which will give us less games against the guys we’ll be facing in the conference tournament.”
The Eagles have done a good job of swinging the bats so far in the early games of the season. The series started with a high scoring game that the Eagles won 16-14.
Kirby was most impressed by the team’s offense in their season opener.
“In the first game we had a lot of guys show out with the bats that helped us win a high scoring close game,” Kirby said.
They managed to put up 12 more runs on the board in their next two games, which brought them to a total of 26 runs in their season opening series. On top of that the team got 37 hits and 22 RBIs, despite losing two of the three games. Although the Eagles’ bats were hot last weekend it proved to not be enough.
The second game got away from the Eagles as they lost 18-7. However, they came back strong in the final game sending the St. Mary’s Rattlers into extra innings. The Eagles unfortunately fell short, losing 6-5 in 12 innings.
Kirby gave his opinion on what the final game came down to.
“Sometimes it’s just baseball,” Kirby said. “I think if we played them again that we would be the team that comes out on top.”
Kirby spoke about some improvements the team needs to work on before their next series.
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