North Carolina State University Athletics
NC State a No. 2 Seed in Austin Regional
5/29/2006 12:00:00 AM | Baseball
May 29, 2006
The NC State baseball team is headed back to the NCAA Regionals for the fourth straight year and the seventh time in 10 years under head coach Elliott Avent.
After advancing to the ACC Tournament championship game at the Baseball Grounds of Jacksonville (Fla.), the Wolfpack (36-21) was selected on Monday as one of 64 teams to partipate in the NCAA Baseball Championship.
Avent's team, seeded second in the regional, will play third-seeded Stanford Friday at noon (Eastern) in a four-team regional in Austin, Texas. All games in the regional will be televised by ESPNU. Play-by-play of the game will be available on www.gopack.com and WKNC 88.1-FM will broadcast the game live.
The Wolfpack and the Cardinal (30-25), which finished fifth in the Pac-10 with an 11-13 conference mark, will be joined in the regional by host and defending national champion Texas (40-19), the region's top seed, and Texas-Arlington (29-13). Those two teams will square off Friday in the second game.
Avent said his team enters the tournament with a renewed confidence after its performance at the ACC Tournament, where the seventh-seeded Wolfpack advanced to the finals after beating North Carolina, Virginia and Florida State, before falling in Sunday's championship game 8-4 to Clemson.
"Other than winning that last game, I am not sure we could be feeling any better," said Avent, whose team was one of seven ACC squads to make the field. "And I am not so sure that losing that game hurt our confidence that much, because I think we understand how we lost it.
"We didn't lose it by making a physical error. We didn't lose it by making a bad pitch.
"We lost it on about three mental errors."
Avent has no doubt that his team is entering NCAA play on an upswing.
"You want to feel like at this point in the season that you are playing well," Avent said. "I think the history of my teams here is that they are always playing their very best at the end of the year.
"We restated that this weekend."
