Kennesaw State advances to Regional Final
Kennesaw State advanced to the Tallahassee Regional final in the early moments of June, after a long rain delay kept the Owls and Georgia Southern from starting at the original 5:00 start time, and an eight run 11th inning, as well as tremendous work from the Owls bullpen, put them into tomorrow’s 5:00 final. Georgia Southern will have to play Alabama, and win, in order to have a rematch.
Georgia Southern took advantage of Owls starter Jordan Hillyer, and put up four runs in the bottom of the opening inning, causing Hillyer to leave after recording just one out, and allowing his bullpen to do the rest of the work, and luckily, they did a tremendous job, allowing just five hits, and one hit after the fifth inning.
Kennesaw St. would come cut the Eagle lead in half in the top of the fourth, but the Eagles would extend their lead to three in the bottom of the fifth, when Hunter Thomas doubled, scoring Stryker Brown. Unfortunately, that would be the final time Southern would cross the plate.
A three run top of the sixth inning would tie the game for KSU, and we would remain in a 5-5 tie for five more innings.
Que the top of the 11th, when the Owls would explode for eight runs and send 12 men to the plate.
The incredible thing about KSU’s 13 runs, is that only three of them were earned. A combination of wild pitches and three Eagles errors allowed 10 earned runs to come across the plate, which was a major reason that Georgia Southern couldn’t pull it off in the end.
Each team now has something to worry about for tomorrow – for the Eagles, its to quickly forget about this disaster, and focus on a power conference school. If they can beat Alabama, than it’ll set up a rematch against the Owls for the possibility for moving on to a Super Regional. For the Owls, it’s the fact that their bullpen worked 10.2 innings tonight. Luckily, they don’t play until 5:00 (while the Tide and Eagles will get underway at 12), but if they run into more starting pitching problems, things could get very interesting.