May 31, 2011
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By Marc Daniels
UCFAthletics.com
ORLANDO, Fla. (UCFAthletics.com) - The wait was too long, but the UCF baseball team has returned to the postseason. The last time UCF saw its name on the NCAA Tournament selection show was 2004. That year the Knights went to Tallahassee and played five games in three days, beating Oklahoma State twice and dropping two of three to host Florida State.
This time UCF will head to Tallahassee and face Alabama in the opening round Friday. The Knights own a 12-4 win over the Crimson Tide this year in a game played in Mobile, Ala., on Feb. 27. UCF pounded out 18 hits, including three home runs, en route to the victory. The trip to FSU for a regional is UCF's fourth in its last five regional appearances. The Knights own a 4-2 record this season against the three teams they will battle with in the regional.
The rebuilding of the UCF team has been a three year process for Terry Rooney who talked about getting to Omaha the day he was hired. This year's team is peaking at the right time by going 9-2 in its last 11 games. It has the offensive power with Jonathan Griffin and his team leading 18 homers and D.J. Hicks who adds 13 long balls. Catcher Beau Taylor has been hot and rides a 15-game hitting streak into this weekend's regional.
How long UCF stays in this tournament will likely depend on pitching. Rooney has seen starters come and go from the rotation and identifying a go-to-guy has not been easy. Yet UCF possesses the arms to go deep into the regional and beyond. UCF starters need to find ways to get to the sixth inning. From there Rooney has his "legion of lefties" who have been lights out all season. The duo of setup men Johnny Sedlock and Nick Cicio have been outstanding down the stretch and closer Joe Rogers has shut the door in numerous games as UCF has come down the stretch of the season.
Knights notes and more: We've got lots of leftovers from the holiday weekend and a 13-hour bus ride home from Jackson, Miss., from the Conference USA Baseball Championship ...The official tournament game program for media and fans was filled with season notes, pretty pictures of the teams and star players. The back cover was a promotional page for CBS Sports Network (formerly known as CBS College Sports).The page highlighted the upcoming C-USA football season on the network and featured their schedule of nationally televised games with a picture of a quarterback on the page. No, not our guy, the guy in Houston...Pearl, Miss., served as a great host for the tournament and Trustmark Park was first class all around. The tournament will return there next season...The pool-play format, which has two groups of four with each team playing three games, seems to be a popular choice among coaches. It did provide three games on the third day of the tournament that had no meaning because pool winners had been decided, but it's still a better format than double-elimination where a team could play five or six games and burn a lot of pitching...I watched more movies on the team bus home than I have watched in the last four years combined. I don't get out much...There's one BCS conference, we'll let you guess which one, studying the issue of oversigning in football. Oversigning is the process where schools sign more than 25 student-athletes to football scholarships. Yes, this same league also allows their members to sign 28 players when the NCAA says 25 is a good number. Sign 28 players each year for four years and you get 112 players. The scholarship limit is 85. Yup, this makes a lot of sense...This same conference and another who goes by a name not equal to the total number of its members have talked about the issue of full-cost scholarships. This idea is where schools would cover additional costs above what the current scholarship provides. A couple of points to note - who determines what those additional costs are and are those costs the same amount in Los Angeles as they are in Monroe, La. Secondly and most important to note, in order for full-cost scholarships to be implemented, the entire membership of the NCAA has to approve the idea. This means all the conferences whose members could not afford to offer the same plan would vote no...Kudos to the UCF track & field team who will send several members of the squad to the NCAA Championships next week at Drake. Among those racing for titles include Aurieyall Scott, Dominique Booker, Jackie Coward and Sheila Paul... It's less than 100 days until the football opener against Charleston Southern. The Bucs did not field a football team until 1991 and the school opened its doors in 1964...Final thought: Is there ever an infomercial on television that doesn't say "But wait, if you act now, we'll throw in..."?
Marc Daniels' From the Press Box runs several times per month on UCFAthletics.com. Listen to Marc during UCF football, men's basketball and baseball radio broadcasts on the UCF Sports Network. Each weekday, Marc hosts The Beat of Sports on ESPN Radio 1080 in Orlando.