Leopards down Bearcats for first conference win
Friday was a special day for the Malvern Leopards baseball team as it marked the one year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic canceling the 2020 baseball season.
On the anniversary, the Leopards were at home hosting the Mena Bearcats, the Leopards’ first home game since the 2019 season. In their first home game of the 2021 season, the Leopards thumped the Bearcats 10-0 to earn their first conference win of the season and their second win of the season. Earlier last week the Leopards took on Nashville to open conference
play and lost 7-2. The Leop
ards kicked off the season in the Benton Classic Tournament going 1-2 against higher classification teams.
Malvern head baseball coach Jordan Knight thought it felt good to play a conference game in front of the home crowd at Morrison Park. “Well it feels good to just be here at this point,” he said. “Because if you remember last year this is when it all got shut down. So for us to make it to this point and have a home conference game, it’s kinda something really sweet to just be able to have the opportunity to keep playing.”
Knight added that the start of the Leopards’ schedule is planned to be tough. “Our schedule at the beginning of the season is really, really tough and we schedule it that way, we plan it that way. Nashville had a great team,” he said. “We came out tonight and we started fast and that’s the way we have to do it. We bunt before we hit, our bunts got us going and so that was able to carry us on to the end of the game.”
In the first inning of Friday’s game the Leopards allowed to one hit to the Bearcats but came up with a double play to get the second and third outs to keep the Bearcats from scoring. The momentum carried into the