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Baseball
Baseball's Season Ends in Sweep to Jesuit
By Zach Warner
The Southlake Journal
A Carroll baseball team that showed the ability to come back from perilous, season-ending situations the week before couldn't seem to find any magic left in the tank for another rally last week.
Losing the first game in its best-of-three area round series with Jesuit, the Dragons were unable to win the final two contests like they did against Keller in bi-district play. In fact, Carroll (20-14-1) ended up exiting the playoffs after a two-game sweep by the Rangers (21-12-1).
Coach Larry Hughes said the reason for the loss wasn't hard to figure out.
"It's just real simple - they just played better than we did," said Hughes, whose saw his team finish its earliest playoff run in several years. "They have better pitching than we do.
"I felt like we were confident and that we could win. We didn't have a good game in that first game of the series again for whatever reason. ... It was the same in the Keller series. We got behind early and had to fight our way out of a hole."
Carroll tied the score with Jesuit at 1-1 in the third inning of the first game, but after that point, the Rangers' offense took over. Scoring nine runs over the next four innings, Jesuit built a 10-1 lead when the Dragons came to bat in the bottom of the seventh. Although Carroll scored four runs in the inning, the deficit was too much to overcome, as the Dragons fell 10-5.
It looked as though Carroll would bounce back in Game 2, as the Dragons took a quick 3-0 lead in the first. But the Rangers answered again, scoring one in the second and three in the fourth to take a 4-3 lead that they would never relinquish.
"We couldn't get anything going later in that [second game with Jesuit]," Hughes said.
Carroll had one last chance to pull off some late-game heroics, as the Dragons had one out with Tommy Avers on second base in the seventh. But Carroll was unable to get the tying run home for the chance to extend its season.
Despite the disappointment of an early exit, Hughes said he's proud of the way his team battled throughout the season amid many challenges.
"I think they did a good job as far as grounding it out and getting out of district," Hughes said of his team's third-place finish in 6-5A. "It's a tough district. We did a great job battling against Keller [in the bi-district round]. Apparently we didn't have the kind of team that could get a long ways in the playoffs. But they fought hard and did their best.
"They're good kids, they did their best with what they had," he said. "It's hard when you're in a tough district and a tough region, and you have to face a lot of tough teams. They did their best in those situations."
Get the full version of this article and full Southlake news at www.southlakejournal.com.
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