Photos by Amanda Hall
Welcome to the Post Season. This year has flown by and its hard to believe that the baseball and softball seasons are beginning to wrap up. The 2A-4 district tournaments begin today in Hackett Arkansas and both the Golden Arrows and the Lady Arrows look to make a statement.
The Golden Arrow baseball team coached by Mark Headley, will enter the tournament as the three seed. This team believes that they can go very deep into the post season. At the plate the Arrows are really seeing the ball well. They have out scored their opponents 36-5 in their last two games, and hit 4 home runs in the same two games. Only two blemishes for Lavaca was a close game against Danville and a rematch game with Hector. The Danville game remained close despite the Arrows’ struggles at the plate. The Arrows had only 2 hits in the game. The Hector game was a game where the Arrows were error plagued. The final two games for the Arrows they seem to have righted the ship. They have been stroking the ball and playing solid defense as of late. Coach Headley feels the Arrows are ready to make a run. He told me, “I feel pretty good about how we are playing going into postseason. I think that our bats are starting to come alive at the right time and I’m pleased with our pitching. I have really challenged our guys about cleaning up our defense. If we want to make a run in postseason we need to play good defense.”
The Arrows will take the field at 8pm tonight to face the winner of the Hackett vs Magazine game. Lavaca took care of business in their meeting with both teams. The Arrows beat Hackett 14-0 with Trey Castor on the mound. Castor pitched a one hit “mercy rule” shutout, striking out eight over five innings. Castor also pitched the Magazine game. In that game he gave up one run on two hits in a three inning “mercy rule” game that lasted 3 innings and struck out five.
For the Lady Arrows they will take the field at 7:30P to face the winner of JC Westside vs Magazine. The Lady Arrows are coming off of a two game slide. They lost to Hector and Mansfield. However, they are far from over. This team knows what it takes to win and they are capable of playing at a high level. Coach Jonathan Vire explained that its time to get refocused on winning. He explained, “We did not accomplish one our goals which was to win conference and get the automatic bid to the Regional Tournament but we still have other goals for the year and they start with the game tonight. We have hit a few bumps in the road and are looking to bounce back and see how far we can ride the season out. The girls came to practice yesterday with great attitudes and that is very encouraging to see. We know the importance of the game tonight… ‘win and we’re in, lose and we’re done’. I truly believe that we will see the team tonight that we come to expect, we have everybody healthy and we are going to lineup defensively like we started the season, were going back to what got us to where we were.”
As far as tonight’s game, the Lady Arrows beat Magazine 10-1 and 14-0 in their last two meetings; and they beat JC Westside 13-0 and 15-2 in their last two meetings. The Lavaca Lady Arrows had set their goals high. They missed the first goal of being Conference Championship, but if they can right he ship during the district tournament, they can still go deep into the playoffs. The road to redemption starts tonight.
