Millsaps eliminates Methodist with an 8-2 win this afternoon.  Huntingdon and Bridgewater are getting ready to play with the loser being eliminated.  That's followed by Millsaps taking on Salisbury, the only undefeated team left in the South regionals.

Salisbury still has their #3 starter available for this evening's game.  Millsaps will probably go with an interesting wild card, a long reliever with 30 innings pitched and a 0.89 era this season.  While playing a 2nd game today is a disadvantage for Millsaps, if they win tonight they will be in the title game tomorrow and will face a team that is playing their second game of the day.

I won't be surprised if Wes Perkins starts a game for Millsaps today.  He closed for 2 innings against Belhaven College late in the season to preserve a victory and he won a SCAC pitcher of the week award his freshman year.  Millsaps used position players Doucet and Shumaker to start games 2 and 3 and they only had 4 starts between them coming into the tournament. 

Millsaps played in a spring break weekend at Piedmont College and won the 2 games that really mattered.  The opening game was against Montclair State of the Mid-Atlantic Region, and while I'm sure Millsaps wanted to win, they couldn't afford to burn up a lot of pitching with 2 South Region opponents coming up.  Montclair won that game Saturday game 14-7.

Millsaps came back on Sunday to beat 15th ranked Piedmont 11-2 and today they beat Methodist 10-1.  That puts the Millsaps record at 10-4 with 7 games left before starting conference play in 3 weeks.  It still feels very odd to play over half of the schedule before starting conference play.

One interesting stat--in 14 games Millsaps has 1 home run.  That's quite a change after years of guys like Garner Wetzel, Hunter Owens, and Will Hawkins putting up double-digit totals.  While the Millsaps starting lineup would never be mistaken for the Bronx Bombers, this kind of power outage is stunning.  Even so, Millsaps has scored 120 runs in 14 games and 10 or more runs in half of their games, so they are finding other ways to get their runs.

Two years ago I was relieved when Millsaps won a game late in the season--that turned out to be the only win of the 2009-10 season.  Now they are in the SCAC Championship game with a 20+ win season.

It is a turn around just as remarkable as when Mike DuBose revived the Millsaps football program.  This success story won't get the attention that it deserves, certainly no where close to the attention football got, but it has been an amazing turnaround.  Congratulations to the coaches and players for the success resulting from their hard efforts.

Now I'm once again just hoping for a single win as the Lady Majors take on Centre for the SCAC Championship.  No doubt that Millsaps has to be considered the underdog in this game, but they have already proven that the seemingly impossible is very much a possibility.

Millsaps went to 2-0 Friday night with an 11-3 win over the Ozarks.  A freshman from Houston got the start and pitched 5 scoreless innings.  A lot of newcomers have gotten a turn on the mound so far and they look like a promising group--too early to tell how they will do over the long haul.  Wes Perkins is back as the starting catcher.

Millsaps has freshmen starters at 3rd and short and they remind me a lot of Will Hawkins and Hunter Abrams.  Hopefully they will put up stats equal to those two over the next 4 years.  Kevin Wall is out with an injury so the second base spot might rotate between several players for now.  Andrew Evans is starting at 1st and is off to a good start with 5 rbi and 2 extra base hits.

Drew Leonard, last year's shortstop has moved to center and Jules Roussel returns in right.  Left field might be a manned by committee situation to start off the season.  In general, I see the Millsaps team as one with a lot of potential this year but one that has a lot of new pieces.  One thing that will be very different is that Millsaps doesn't start conference play until March 22nd since they are now in the SCAC East.  This might be a perfect year for such a late start of conference play.

Millsaps started off this year with a nice win over NAIA Blue Mountain and then got hammered by a very strong Louisiana College team (currently 15-2).  That huge loss (87-48) to LC was a case of a very experienced team overwhelming a freshman heavy roster, a situation that wasn't helped by Millsaps having Janice Okeke sitting on the bench with an injury.

The next lost came in game #5, a very disappointing but promising 66-61 home loss to Centre where Millsaps held the lead with less than a minute to play.  It was Okeke's first game of the season and she only contributed 6 points and 3 rebounds, but Millsaps made up for this loss on the inside by hitting 9 of 15 3-point shots.

Who would have thought at that time that now we would find Centre (16-1) and Millsaps (17-2) sitting at the top of the SCAC rankings?  Centre is no big surprise, but this is a Millsaps program that was 1-24 during the 2009-10 season and then made a coaching change late which basically eliminated recruiting for the 2010-11 season.  Things were so thin on the Millsaps bench last year that two volleyball players were recruited late in the year just to keep the roster in the upper single-digits.  Despite the lack of recruiting and lack of depth, Millsaps went 12-13 overall and 8-8 in the SCAC.  Maybe that rapid turnaround should have told us that a big season was coming in 2011-12.

Being a realist, I recognize that Millsaps being 17-2 and 11-0 away from home is partially a case of things going the right way in some close games.  During the 5 games from December 29 through January 8, Millsaps won by 4 at Huntingdon, 3 at Rhodes, and went into OT on the road at BSC and Oglethorpe.  Millsaps recently had a close 4 point home win over Colorado.  But even if the record was "only" 14-5 right now, what a remarkable turnaround that would be from where this team was just a couple of years ago.

All in all, it has been a great job done by Coach Chuck Winkelman, his assistant Jerri Cooper, and by the players on the team.  I look forward to seeing how the rest of the season unfolds and seeing how the Lady Majors do in this year's SCAC Tournament.  I also look forward to seeing how Millsaps will do when Coach Winkelman has a roster filled with 3 or 4 recruiting classes instead of just 1.  The present and the future look bright for Lady Majors baskeball.

Sewanee makes DePauw 0-for-3 against former SCAC opponents in 2011 with a 30-7 whitewashing. 
Millsaps holds off Rhodes to keep their flickering championship hopes alive, 44-36.

Ron, I absolutely haven't been keeping up with any SCAC sports this year including Millsaps.  Isn't the Millsaps situation a case of needing to run the table and then hope that BSC or Centre get a win over Trinity?  That seems like championship hopes that are better than flickering, unless it is the play of the Majors that makes such an occurance unlikely.  Like I said, I really haven't kept up with anything well enough to know the likelihood of Millsaps winning out the rest of the way.

BTW, I've been doing music videos in place of sports photos.  Covered 3 bands last night, getting ready to go film 2 tonight, and there will be a whole slew of bands to recorded tomorrow at a benefit show here in town that features a huge lineup of acts.

Breakaway SCAC picks a name:
http://www.d3sports.com/notables/2011/08/new-southern-conference-picks-a-name

Link to the Southern Athletic Association website--the only content is the league's official release.  There's an icon to click at the bottom left of the website for that release.

Link:  http://www.saa-sports.com/splash/index