As Northwestern celebrated and held its team meeting, fresh off a series win over South Carolina, Mark Kingston huddled his team just up the right field line after the alma mater.
The meeting after the Gamecocks’ first series loss of the year seemed to take a little longer than most, and Kingston’s message was a clear one.
“It’s a new team that is learning that Friday night and tonight—close games—need to be won and there are certain things that need to be done to win these games,” he said. “We’ll learn as we go. You want to win when you learn these lessons, but I hope this one stings for them. They are a captive audience as we teach them how to win.”
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South Carolina dropped the rubber match of this weekend’s Northwestern series 4-3 in extra innings after a back-and-forth game from the start of the fifth onward.
After the Gamecocks (5-2) went up by two runs in the fifth, Northwestern scored the final three runs of the game, one on a double play, another on a solo homer and the ultimately winning run on a bases loaded walk.
The Gamecocks, meanwhile, stranded eight batters and hit 2-for-12 with runners in scoring position.
As Kingston talked, he mentioned those things and some of the things needing tweaking and cleaning up before four more games this week. They’ll do more review as the week goes on and they break down film of this weekend’s series.
“You need to point out things in that game that should have been handled differently or approached differently and we’ll review that on film with the guys,” Kingston said. “It’s also a matter of getting a feel of what it feels like in the tenth inning of a tie ball game. You can’t mimic that in practice. It’s a combination of the two.”
After the game, as he was talking, he seemed to notice the team receiving the message well.
Kingston and the entire team knows a series loss seven games into the year isn’t the end of the world with 48 games still to play but understand there are things still in need of bettering as SEC play looms in a few weekends.
“It was received fine,” Kingston said of the message. “They know we’re not going to panic, they know we’re not going to stray from what wins and loses. I just reminded them what wins games and why we lost today. It’s as simple as that.”
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The Gamecocks have one midweek game—Tuesday against North Florida—before the biggest series of the year so far with the annual rivalry against Clemson getting renewed.
It’ll be important for the players to go ahead and fix the mistakes and put a series loss behind them before the Tigers come to town Friday night.
“We have a really big series coming up next week and it’s one of the biggest rivalries in college sports. Let’s keep our focus on that, throw this away. We need to learn from this and forget like it ever happened at the same time. There are bigger things ahead.”
