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FARGO — "T.O.’s (NDSU head baseball coach, Tyler Oakes) has been preaching the whole season about being gritty and taking the adversity with us, and it’s been working in our favor,” said senior catcher Logan Williams.
This season, the odds were stacked against NDSU baseball.
Tyler Oakes began his first season as head coach for the Bison. The team lost eight seniors, five of which were position player starters, and 40 of 47 games were played on the road.
But the Bison found a way to persevere, becoming regular season Summit League champions for the first time in program history.
"That was my main goal coming in here was helping this team win, getting that number one seed, of course, during the regular season," said Williams who transferred from Kansas to NDSU. "So that was pretty huge."
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"We have guys that get to work each day and kind of have that blue collar, chip on their shoulder kind of approach," said Oakes. "All the credit goes to them for coming together and showing that last year wasn’t a fluke and that we have a lot of talented players that can play with anyone around.”
The Bison have won five of their last six games and work to ride that momentum to secure back to back tournament titles.
“We want to be reckless and try to cause a lot of havoc out there," said sophomore outfielder Cayden Schwabe. "We’ve just been trying to be gritty. We don’t always have the prettiest wins I'd say, but just being tough every day."
The game plan to lead the Bison to success in Tulsa is simple.
"Being who we are and not trying to do too much and just do what we’ve done all year," Schwabe said. "Play good, clean defense, throw strikes and just play. We can’t worry about the scoreboard down there.”
"We have a lot of guys with experience," he said. "We should feel really good heading into the weekend, and I know our guys will be ready to go.”
NDSU will play Omaha on Wednesday at 12:05 p.m.
