Baseball gains recognition on national level
But COVID-19 issues scuttle key weekend series
When asked about the biggest steps his Pitt baseball team has made in the past year, Mike Bell thinks of the smiles.
The 2020 season was cut short after just 16 games due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That was followed by weeks and months of uncertainty about what would come next. Even a return to campus and the promise of a new season offered only so much normalcy, between quarantines, testing and a slew of other hoops through which they had to jump.
Once they were able to gather together again on Charles L. Cost Field, Bell noticed something in his players, from freshmen to fifthand sixth-year players like Nico Popa and David Yanni.
“The ability to just get on a field and do the things you love to do, to have a sense of normalcy, I think you saw the smiles and the appreciation of the athletes,” Bell said.
Over the past two months, those smiles haven’t dissipated.
With a month remaining in the regular season, Pitt is relevant in college baseball nationally in a way it hasn’t been in years. At 20-11, the Panthers are ranked 16th in the latest national poll. Their 14 wins in ACC play are already the most in their seven seasons in the league and that’s with 12 intraconference games remaining. Given its success to this point, Pitt appears well-positioned to make the NCAA tournament for the first time since 1995.
In Bell’s third season at the helm of the program, the Panthers have showed signs of progress. They won a seasonopening series against what is now a ranked Indiana State squad before sweeping thenNo. 9 Florida State, a national power where Bell spent seven seasons as an assistant coach. Even when they briefly slipped, losing four consecutive games in late March and early April, they recovered, winning eight of their next nine.
“What you also saw was depth and competition,” Bell said of his expectations coming into the season. “I just think as the roster has been able to change for the last three years — with the influx of some transfers and juco products, but also guys that have been within the program and have been able to develop — you just saw things start to shift and start to turn.”
Their most recent victories came last weekend, with a series win against North Carolina. Across those three games, Yanni was 5 of 12 with three RBIs while Ron Washington Jr. was 4 of 11 with two RBIs and a 437-foot home run that prompted an emphatic bat flip before he began his trot to first base.
Washington has emerged as one of the team’s top hitters, with a .323 batting average. Pitt’s most productive bat has belonged to Popa, a Seton LaSalle graduate who leads the team in batting average (.351) and on-base percentage (.427). As a team, the Panthers are fifth among the ACC’s 14 teams in batting average (.276) and ERA (4.45).
Most notably, they’ve made significant strides in their record, with only one fewer win than they had in all of their most recent full season (2019), and that’s still with 15 games to play.
“We have program goals that we set from day one when we got here,” Bell said. “That falls in line with the administration and what their vision is here at Pitt. That’s to compete for championships. We want to prepare our guys to do so. We weren’t going to say it’s championship or bust or anything like that. We weren’t going to predict anything. We can’t get ahead of ourselves. We can’t look at what it’s supposed to look like down the road until we toe the line and compete.”
There are significant games looming immediately ahead. However, the Panthers’ three-game weekend series with No. 7 Louisville was canceled Wednesday. The series, a matchup of top-20 squads, was shelved because of positive results, contact tracing and subsequent quarantining within the Pitt program.
Beyond that lost series, 12 of Pitt’s next 15 games come against teams with losing records. Not that Bell would ever look that far ahead.
“I think the league provides opportunities for every program,” he said. “It’s as big as what you want to make out of it. The ironic thing is whether you’re playing Louisville or Wake Forest or Duke or Georgia Tech, a win is a win and a loss is a loss. If you try to make more out of it and get yourself out of what you’re trying to accomplish, it can bury you.”
Men’s soccer
The Panthers secured the No. 2 overall seed for the NCAA tournament, a designation revealed Monday.
It’s the highest seed Pitt has received for the tournament and, after making the 2019 field, it marks the first time in program history that it has made back-to-back appearances in the tournament.
The Panthers’ first game will be May 2 against the winner of an earlier match between Bowling Green and Monmouth. Should they win that game, they would play in the round of 16 on May 6 against either Central Florida or James Madison. Pitt’s placement in the bracket came after falling to Clemson, the tournament’s No. 1 overall seed, 2-0, in the ACC championship last Saturday.
Softball
As the baseball team captured a three-game series against North Carolina, its softball team did something even better against the Tar Heels — it swept them.
The Panthers took four consecutive games from North Carolina, scoring at least six runs in each of the games. Those triumphs sharply reversed a five-game losing streak and ended a stretch in which Pitt lost 13 of 14 games. With the wins, Pitt nearly doubled its ACC victory total this season, from five to nine ( against 20 losses).
In the four games against the Tar Heels, junior Sarah Seamans smashed three home runs, along with eight hits and eight RBIs. For her efforts, she was named the ACC player of the week. Sophomore EC Taylor, a Florida transfer, went 10 of 14 with seven runs and four RBIs.
Track and field
At the Virginia Challenge in Charlottesville, Va., senior Felix Wolter broke the school record in the decathlon, winning eight of the 10 events for a score of 7,950 points, which marked the second-best score in the NCAA this season and the eighth best in the world. The Munich native’s scores in the long jump, pole vault and high jump have placed him in the top-10 in those respective events in Pitt history.
Senior Kollin Smith finished in first place in the 110meter hurdles and the long jump, recording the secondlongest distance in program history in the latter. While finishing in third place, senior Noah Walker set a school record in the discus, breaking the previous record by more than five feet. Junior Eddita Pessima was victorious herself, finishing first in the 100-meter hurdles.
Senior Ally Brunton’s time of 2:08.17 in the 800-meter run was the fourth-fastest time in the event in program history and the fastest since 2000.