East Carolinian

Issue date: 5/20/09 Section: Sports

Media Credit: Travis Bartlett

The past few months have been a memorable span for ECU fans, coaches and players in respect to Conference USA.

The ECU soccer team was the first to strike, claiming the C-USA regular season title. The men's programs would not have to wait long, as the ECU football team, led by Patrick Pinkney and Pierre Bell, claimed a C-USA championship of its own.

Now, the Pirate baseball team has claimed the program's second regular season conference title and first under head coach Billy Godwin.

A talented group of senior position players and a young pitching staff lead the 2009 version of the Diamond Bucs. They scored 10 or more runs in a game 21 times and also held opponents to three or less runs 20 times. On top of that, the Pirates also defeated bitter in-state rival N.C. State twice as well as North Carolina and Rice when each were ranked No.1 in the country.

Winning the regular season conference title was not easy for this talented bunch of ball players though.

After dropping two out of three to then No.1 ranked Rice, followed by two C-USA losses to Tulane and one each to Houston and Southern Miss, the Pirates seemed to be behind the eight ball when it came to winning the conference.

This team knew what it had to do coming into this past weekend and took care of business, taking all three games in deciding fashion against Memphis, before then heading back into the confinement of the locker rooms at Clark-LeClair Stadium to play the dreaded waiting game.

With Rice having already lost one game to UAB, the outright conference title for ECU all came down to one game at Young Memorial Field in Birmingham on Saturday afternoon.

All of Pirate nation, including myself, were glued to the computers watching to see if UAB could pull off the upset and propel the Pirates to an outright conference title. The Blazers held an improbable 15-10 lead heading into the ninth inning after being down 8-1 after four innings of action. The tension was mounting as I could feel a conference title well within the grasp of the Diamond Bucs.

Rice plated two runs in the ninth inning and had two runners on with two outs. The Pirate Nation was left cheering hard for a UAB program with little athletic history to pull off the upset over the national powerhouse Owls.

After a long at bat, the final Rice batter popped up to deep left field and as I and hundreds of others watched, praying the ball would be caught, the ball landed in the left fielder's glove and just like that, it was over.

Just before 6 p.m. Saturday afternoon, for the first time in the history of C-USA, the Pirates were regular season conference champions.

The success of ECU's athletic programs transcends what happens in between the lines; the Pirates' conference champion programs have brought a sense of passion, pride and commitment to a nation of fans that have been loyal to the Purple and Gold whether in good times or bad.

This year has made all the previous ones of struggling worth it.

What this group of seniors has done from Ryan Wood, Drew Schieber, Stephen Batts and Brandon Henderson to Pierre Bell, Zack Slate and Davon Drew is really special and is something the Pirate Nation will remember forever.



This writer can be contacted at sports@theeastcarolinian.com.

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