Swim and Serra walking into Collins Hill’s field
Pavement never seems as familiar as it does during baseball season. To quote one of Willie Nelson’s marquee songs, we are “on the road again.” For the next seven games the Phoenix will live the nomadic lifestyle, having the greyhound bus as the closest thing to home. Thursday the Phoenix made a 9-hour trek through the Carolinas and my home state of Georgia on our way to Alabama to play the Samford Bulldogs. Last week’s series victory over Appalachian State and this weekend’s matchup was sandwiched between a midweek win against the UNCW Seahawks. Winning 3 games out of the last 4 was a confidence booster for the whole team, and as Coach Kennedy oftentimes will say: “confidence breeds success” — we’re hoping to verify that phrase this weekend against the No. 2-ranked team in the Southern Conference.
We left Elon right after our last class to hit the road on our longest road trip of the year. As is tradition, we had movies playing on the TVs sprinkling the bus — this ride’s showing was The Departed, Old School, and The Warrior. The Warrior had the large majority of our team’s emotions in a flurry of testosterone pumping excitement and the urge to open up the waterworks,
Jodi refuses to have her picture taken. These are her paparazzi shots after practice at Collins Hill.
luckily we don’t have tear ducts so the urges were fruitless. After watching a couple of the movies and driving right by my house, we stopped right outside of Atlanta to practice at Collins Hill High School. This was a cool experience for me because when I was in middle school I played travel baseball games at Collins Hill. Sweet reminiscing of travel ball: doubleheaders every weekend, late-night drives around the Peach State with my Dad, and staying in hotels with teammates (which you oftentimes got into trouble in meandering around the lobby with bouncy balls and adolescent mischief). While at Collins Hill, some of the high school players stayed and watched us hit batting practice. I speak for us all when I say that having kids watch us play and hitting on a smaller field and watching the balls fly in the humid Georgia air gave us all a spring in our step and a whip in our bat speed. Kinsella, Garrett, Connor, McVicar and PAONE put on a home run light show dotting the fields beyond the outfield wall with blistered baseballs. If I were a budding high school player gazing at the show, I would’ve been energized in my aspirations at the excitement that comes from college baseball. The last few hours on the bus were filled with normalcies: Brez and others playing cards in the back of the bus, Grant listening to new tunes on his Apple Nano watch, McVicar dreaming of the Charger (Chaa-jjaa), Quinn listening to budding rappers, and Elefante playing video games on his phone while slouching into my side of the seat as I unashamedly rock a nerd-status reading Augustine’s “Confessions.”
We rolled into the Days Inn in Birmingham, Ala., around midnight central time where we all quickly passed out in a travel daze. Well, almost all of us. I had to wait an hour for the internet to kick back up before I could turn in an assignment due early this morning for my Sports Media class — a drawback of the season is the combination of travel and academics. Someone who doesn’t let the weight bring his academics down in Fish, who was at the breakfast table at 7 a.m. this morning doing schoolwork.
Huff’s very accurate tweet during our BP
After upgrading to a much better hotel in the heart of Birmingham we rolled up to Samford’s field to be greeted by an unplayable rain-drenched field. They rescheduled the game until tomorrow, marking our fourth doubleheader of the year. Before we left the field, the position players climbed what seemed to be endless stairs to get to some batting cages overlooking the football stadium. According to the eloquent wordsmith on our team, Grant, the “Feng Shui of this cage was not up to par.” Neighboring the cages was a high school girl’s AAU basketball game being played that left our team glued to the future Lisa Leslies. During this time, the pitchers were feeding their obsession of the game “Ninja” on the field below.
The game “Ninja” was taken to a different level tonight while we waited to get on the bus back to the hotel. Position players joined the pitchers in the parking lot for an unusually large circle that was boisterous enough to have a Birmingham police car drive up in curiosity. The game had its war scars as Elefante was covered with a Chik-Fil-A milkshake after the game ended.
The Phoenix hopes to take that same energy to the field tomorrow as we take on the Samford Bulldogs en route to #DefendingTheRing.
Luce showing off his freestyle rapping skills on the bus
Elon Baseball 