SEC play brings a lot of intensity, rivalry and great competition to the baseball season. South Carolina fans saw all of these in this weekend's series against Florida — despite the Gamecocks dropping the series 2-1.
The No. 2 Gators threw everything they had at the Gamecocks, but South Carolina battled back throughout the entire weekend. Even though they couldn't come away with the series win, head coach Mark Kingston saw a lot of positives and improvements from his team over the weekend.
"Our job is to go toe-to-toe with anybody and we did that," Kingston said. "We came up one run short today from winning the series, so it doesn't mean we haven't gotten stronger, doesn't mean we're not learning more about our team, doesn't mean we're not making more progress that will help us down the road. We did lose today and it's very disappointing, but we are getting better, we are getting closer and we're getting stronger as a team."
Friday's game featured all of the emotion and intensity one could expect from a conference opener. Kingston was ejected in the fourth inning after arguing balls and strikes with the umpire, then Carlos Cortes was ejected an inning later after striking out and slamming his bat on the ground.
The game featured one of the top pitching matchups in the country with Adam Hill and Brady Singer on the mound. The Gators made Hill work, earning three runs off of him on three hits over 4.2 innings. The Gamecocks, on the other hand, had a hard time getting past Singer, scoring just one run on two hits off of him. Florida scored in the ninth inning and that would seal the 7-3 win and hand South Carolina its first SEC loss.
Saturday's game was a much needed bounce-back game for the Gamecocks, and they did so in a huge way. South Carolina scored a season-high 15 runs on a season-high 16 hits in the 15-7 win. Cody Morris got things started and pitched a clean 5.1 innings on the way to his fourth win of the season. The middle to bottom of the lineup provided most of the spark, as the four, five, six and seven hitters had 10 RBIs on the night.
After the offensive explosion the night before, the Gamecocks struggled to bring home baserunners on Sunday. South Carolina left 10 men on during the game and could only push two runs across. Despite losing by one, Kingston wasn't too disappointed to suffer the loss and said his players really fought all weekend.
"That's the best team in the country according to some polls, and we went toe-to-toe with them for 27 innings," Kingston said. "We had 15 runs yesterday against some really good pitching, we went toe-to-toe with them today, 3-2 ballgame and the winning run was an unearned run so we played just as well as they did. That's a good team and we played just as well as they did all weekend so to me that's something we'll build on and will help our confidence, but it also means we lost the series, so it means there's more work to be done."
Jacob Olson went 0-for-4 in the series opener but was a big part in the remaining games, hitting a home run in both Saturday and Sunday's games. He now leads the team with six home runs and is hitting .229 on the year. He echoed Kingston, saying that getting the big win on Saturday and battling all weekend is a good starting place for conference play.
"That's something to be proud of," Olson said. "We played hard all three games and I think we really ... grew as a team this weekend and I think taking that into the rest of the season is going to be really good for us."
South Carolina (13-7, 1-2 SEC) will now travel a little bit, starting at the Citadel on Tuesday before going to Georgia next weekend for a three-game series against the Bulldogs. The Gamecocks have played away from Founders Park just twice so far, with once at Clemson and once at Fluor Field in Greenville, losing both times.