Booming bats carry Cypress Woods during playoff run
Easy outs are hard to come by when pitching against the Cypress Woods lineup.
The Wildcats are averaging 7.4 runs per game this season and have come up with some great situational hitting during the team’s 10-1 playoff run.
The bats are a big reason Cypress Woods (38-4) has reached the UIL Class 6A state tournament for the first time in program history. The Wildcats will play Lewisville Flower Mound (35-10-2) at 4 p.m. Friday in the semifinals at Dell Diamond in Round Rock.
“It’s been super exciting, but it’s been a grind,” said senior shortstop Tristan Russell, a University of Houston signee. “When you get to the playoffs, it’s like you’re playing another whole season of baseball, but it’s been a lot of fun. We’ve had a lot of energy, and a lot of different players have stepped up in big moments.”
Russell hits third in the Wildcats’ lineup and enters the state tournament with a .319 batting average for the season. His two-run triple in the eighth inning against Rockwall Heath in Game 3 of the regional semifinals put the finishing touches on an 8-4 victory that kept the season alive.
“The main word I would use to describe us is tough,” Russell said. “We’ve had a lot of situations where we’ve had to claw back from being down, and we’ve always come through. We never gave up.”
Russell isn’t the only player who’s come up clutch at the plate during the playoffs.
Senior Texas State signee Ethan Farris is batting .475 out of his cleanup spot and connected for the goahead RBI double in the eighth inning of the Wildcats’ 4-2 victory over Oak Ridge in Game 2 of the area round.
Junior McClane Helton is batting .336 and delivered the go-ahead, tworun double in the bottom of the fifth inning of Game 1 against Oak Ridge.
During a 5-4 victory against The Woodlands in Game 1 of the regional finals, it was junior Wyatt Wimberly, the No. 6 hitter, who came through with the go-ahead, two-run single in the top of the seventh inning.
“In the game of baseball, you’ve got to have some luck and have some things go your way sometimes, and you’ve got to come up big in big moments,” Cypress Woods coach Phillip Schwarz said. “I feel like we’ve done that. We’ve gotten behind a couple times, and we’ve responded well to that adversity and been able to bounce back when things got tough.”
The Wildcats have scored at least seven runs in all but three of their 11 playoff games. The team’s lineup is a minefield, especially at the top of the order with senior TCU signee Sam Myers (.363 batting average), senior Texas A&M signee Brady Sullivan (.354), Russell and Farris getting things started.
Cypress Woods has produced strong offensive outings in the playoffs against some talented Division Ibound pitchers, including Oak Ridge’s Hayden Morris
(Texas), Rockwall Heath’s Jack Sharp (Texas A&M) and The Woodlands’ Brayden Sharp (Tennessee).
Cypress Woods will have a good challenge Friday against Flower Mound senior pitcher Jacob Gholston, a 6-foot-6 Oklahoma signee who has a 12-2 record this season. If the Wildcats are able to win and move on to the championship game, they will await either Austin Westlake or Pearland, a pair of teams that also have no shortage of talented arms.
“I think everyone just knows their role,” Russell said. “We don’t try to do too much. Really we just take it one at-bat at a time. Everyone knows what they need to do to get the job done, and that’s worked for us.”