Rotation, injury and weather updates for USC baseball on eve of NCAA tournament
In its final practice before the NCAA tournament on Thursday, South Carolina baseball kept things simple.
At East Carolina's Clark-LeClair Stadium, the Gamecocks took a break from their usual regimen of hitting off 92-mile per hour hitting machines, using pitching coach Skylar Meade to simulate the left-hander USC will face Friday against Ohio State.
Velocity wasn't the only thing missing. Despite, or perhaps because of, the team's late-season surge into the postseason, Carolina coaches and players also said they felt no pressure as they prep for their regional.
"At this point, if you start to get tight or start to try to do too much, that's when you start to feel the pressure, and when you feel pressure, you don't apply pressure," coach Mark Kingston said. "So our mindset is we're going to come out here and leave it all out on the field, play confident, play loose."
"We've felt pretty confident going into a lot of weekends recently," freshman Noah Campbell said. "After LSU, the sky was the limit for us, so we've been confident for a while now."
WEEKEND ROTATION TAKES SHAPE
After announcing Wednesday that junior Adam Hill would start against Ohio State, Kingston explained his decision, and also announced the likely starter for Saturday's game as well.
"In this setting, you have to win the first two games to have the best chance to win, so Adam and (sophomore Cody Morris) at this point over the last month of the season have been our top two guys, they're our veterans," Kingston said. "To me, it was a very easy decision.
"We're going to go as far in this tournament as Adam, Cody and the rest of our starters takes us. It's a natural decision to give Adam the ball, and then hopefully we win that game. If you do, probably Cody will be ready for that next game."
Despite that, though, Hill said he feels confident, not nervous, about winning the all-important opener.
"There's no pressure. I trust my team and they trust me," he said. "If there's one thing I can tell you, it's gonna be I'm going to go out there tomorrow and I'm going to compete and try to dominate."
INJURY UPDATE
Kingston updated his injury list on Thursday, saying relievers Ridge Chapman and Sawyer Bridges, who both missed several games in the SEC tournament and the end of the season, are back to full health and will be available.
Junior center fielder TJ Hopkins, however, remains limited with a tweaked back. Though he took batting practice, Hopkins has yet to face the high-velocity pitching machines Kingston loves to use. But even if he can't hit, the outfielder may still play at some point, Kingston said.
"Always hopeful, like our fans, always hoping he can impact some games," he said. "Just don't know in what capacity that would be yet. It's a long shot at this point probably that he would start a game. So he may impact the game more with his legs and his defense at this point."
FIELD CONDITIONS, FORECAST
After more than an hour of work at Clark-LeClair Stadium, senior Madison Stokes described the field as a hitters' park.
"Ball flies here ... the field plays really fast, the grass is really short, the ball flies," Stokes said. "We'll be accustomed to that practicing here today. We can swing it from top to bottom ... so I'm really excited to see what we can do this weekend."
The Gamecocks have more home runs this season than any other team in the regional.
However, the weather may put a damper on USC's bats, and on baseball all together. Thunderstorms and scattered showers will threaten Saturday and Sunday, with the threat peaking in the evenings. Friday is expected to be cloudy but clear.
This story was originally published May 31, 2018 at 3:31 PM with the headline "Rotation, injury and weather updates for USC baseball on eve of NCAA tournament."