Baseabll Holds Spirited Practice In First Day Of Spring Drills
Feb 1, 2008 | Baseball
Feb. 1, 2008
NEW ORLEANS, La. - The Tulane University baseball squad took the field for the first time as an entire unit in 2008 as the Green Wave opened team spring practice Friday afternoon at the new Greer Field at Turchin Stadium.
After holding individual drills for the last several weeks, all 36 members of the Green Wave roster were on hand at once as the team went through an array of drills. While Tulane held practice during the fall semester, the team is still learning the nuances of the new stadium, including a new FieldTurf surface which takes away the bad-hop ground ball.
"It's always fun the first day and it most certainly was today," Tulane head coach Rick Jones said. "We got some things accomplished. I thought we did well in our bunt defense and our bunt offense today, and I thought we handled ourselves in our drill series well. The thing that we have to make sure we don't do is let this field put you in too much of a comfort zone and your errors become careless errors. That's got to be a priority for us and certainly we're going to make that a point of emphasis."
Practice began at 2:15 p.m. with a brief meeting in the Milton J. "Mickey" Retif, Jr. Memorial Clubhouse, and the team hit the field 15 minutes later where they stretched and threw to get loose. From there, the Green Wave went through base-running drills, bunt practice, bunt defense drills as well as a series of defensive situational scenarios.
The highlight of the day came in the final hour and 50 minutes as the team went held competitive batting practice. Unlike regular batting practice, where players swing away in order to get their timing down, the Green Wave student-athletes stepped to the plate as situations were being announced and every fifth pitch was played live by the defense.
Freshman utility athlete Rob Segedin, junior first baseman Sam Honeck and junior outfielder Andrew Rodgers were a handful of the Green Wave newcomers to stand out offensively as the trio hit several home runs and hit the ball well to all parts of the field.
Defensively, junior infielder Anthony Scelfo made several nice plays at both second and third base and junior outfielder Aja Barto made several highlight-reel catches in center. The play of the day, however, came courtesy of junior second baseman Seth Henry who laid out on a hard-hit ground ball up the middle, flipped the ball over his head as he was falling to sophomore shortstop Josh Prince, who in turn fired a strike to Honeck at first for a double play.
"The ball jumped off our bats pretty good today," Jones said. "We hit some balls deep in the gaps and hit some out of the ballpark. The old Turchin always played smaller in the spring than it did in the fall. Today, the stadium played much smaller than it had at any point last fall."
The Green Wave will continue spring drills with weekend practices on Saturday and Sunday at 1 p.m. before holding practice at 10 a.m. on both Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday's practice is slated for 5:30 p.m.
The Green Wave begin the 2008 season on Friday, Feb. 22, when they open Greer Field at Turchin Stadium with a 7 p.m. first pitch against Illinois-Chicago. For more ticket information, contact the Tulane Athletics Ticket Office at (504) 861-WAVE.
