Nothing special is needed. The “special” is built in.
Bryant Hornets head baseball coach Kirk Bock has led teams to the State finals seven times. His teams have won four, three at Bryant and one at Harrison. So, it figures if anybody could say what was needed to prepare for one, he would be the guy to ask.
Practice?
“Nothing different. We just keep trying to get better at what we do,” he said.
Perspective?
“Making the kids realize it’s just another baseball game,” Bock replied.
Motivation?
“The hype and the facilities and the stuff like that get you motivated,” he answered. “So there’s no sense in trying to motivate them. They’re motivated.
“It’s just making them realize it’s another baseball game,” the coach reiterated. “You’re just on a different stage.”
There will be a lot of blue taking over for the Razorback red at the University of Arkansas’ Baum Stadium on Friday evening when the Hornets take on the archrival Conway Wampus Cats to decide the championship of Class 7A for 2016. Both figure to bring a lot of followers for the 5:30 p.m. game, which Walter Woodie, a high school sports historian of some repute in Arkansas, notes may be the first time a State title game has featured two coaches — Bock and Conway’s Noel Boucher — with over 600 career wins apiece.
The Hornets will be after their fourth title in six years. Conway last won in 2011 in a battle with Bryant in the only recent championship game to be held anywhere other than Baum. The games were moved to UCA in Conway.
Bryant will be trying to keep the pattern going after winning in 2010, 2012 and 2014. Conway will be trying to avoid its fate in the 2015 championship game when the Bentonville Tigers handed them a tough 6-5 loss. Much of the Wampus Cats’ personnel from that team returned this year.
It’ll be the rubber game of the season between the two Central Conference teams. In Conway April 5, the Cats handed the Hornets their only in-state loss of the year, taking advantage of five Bryant errors to score four runs in the first inning, which held up for the victory as the Hornets’ Zach Jackson and Conway’s Collin Cahill dueled the rest of the way. The same duo locked horns in the rematch in Bryant on April 28 and Jackson got the better of it as the Hornets eked out a 2-1 win.
Jackson, a University of Arkansas signee, and Cahill, an Arkansas State signee, are expected to be dueling again.
It figures to be close and low scoring once more.
“I would think so,” Bock acknowledged. “I wouldn’t think it’d be a lopsided game but you never know. Whoever makes the least amount of mistakes is going to come out winning.”
It won’t be the first time Jackson has faced Conway in the State Tournament either. When he was a sophomore in 2014, the right-hander shutout the Cats in a 2-0 semifinal win that set up the Hornets’ stunning championship game romp over Fayetteville, 10-0.
In fact, in those even years, Bryant pitchers have thrown nine shutouts in 11 State tourney games including the 4-0 win over Cabot and the 10-0 win over Har-Ber this year.
This year’s pitching staff, featuring Jackson (8-1, 0.44 earned run average) and Evan Lee (9-0, 0.54) has a team ERA of 1.01.
Offensively, Bryant has averaged 8 runs a game with a .359 team batting average. Lee, Logan Allen and Aaron Orender each have batting averages over .400 with Jordan Gentry and Garrett Misenheimer both over .350. Misenheimer leads the team in runs batted in with 36.
Conway had to battle to get back to the championship game with plenty of its own offensive firepower. The Cats went eight innings to beat Springdale 1-0 then rallied to beat Bentonville, 8-6, in an emotional rematch of the 2015 final. To top that, the Cats went 11 innings against another Central Conference rival before extracting an 8-7 victory over Little Rock Catholic.
The Bryant-Conway rivalry has always been heated and close. In fact, in the years since Bock arrived in Bryant in 2009, the teams have split 14 meetings. Conway has outscored Bryant in those 14 games by an average of 6.4 runs to 6.0. If you actually go back to 1994, Conway has won 24 times and Bryant 22.
This year, the Hornets are 30-2 and the Wampus Cats are 23-7.
