Baseball: Tigers will rest, focus on exams before tournament

“Well, until the 21st, exams,” coach Scott Bradley answered. “With the long layoff, we were able to give the guys this week off to focus on final exams and papers and Dean’s Date.”

Bradley said he has not seen his players since Sunday’s win over the Big Green. On May 22, the team will reconvene to resume practice and begin preparing for a scrimmage slate with teams in the Patriot League, which traditionally plays against the Ivy League champions to prepare them for the NCAA Tournament. However, it won’t be until May 30 that the Tigers finally learn their opponent’s identity.

The tournament, which fields 64 teams, is broken up into three stages. The first stage, Regionals, consists of 16 groups with four teams each. The team that wins their Regional pool advances to a Super Regional, a best-of-three series against another Regional winner. The eight teams that win their Super Regional matchup advance to the College World Series.

The Tigers will enter the tournament as the fourth and last seed in their Regional pool, but that won’t stop them from dreaming big. The young squad has already proven its resiliency this season, bouncing back from a late-inning collapse against Dartmouth in the second game of the Ivy League Championship Series to grind out a hard-fought win in the third game.

“Playing against the defending champions, you have an idea that they may do something like that,” Bradley said of the Big Green’s second-game victory. “Our guys were able to go out and win a game where you’re counting down the outs. I think it’s shown how much we’ve grown up this season.”

To be successful in the NCAA tournament, Bradley said he is relying on the same formula that has driven Princeton to the top of the Ivy League in the regular season: hard-nosed playing, dominant pitching and timely hitting.

Whether or not that will work against the cream of college baseball remains to be seen. But if you’re concerned about the team being cowed by the big stage, don’t be.

“Our guys don’t know any better,” Bradley said. “When we sit back and we look at the Regionals — you know, we’ve had a great year, we’ve won the Ivy League Championships — now when you go to a Regionals, for our guys, it’s the experience. We want to go to a baseball hotbed. We want to go to where college baseball is king.”

Bradley reminisced about Princeton’s last trip to Regionals in 2006. Though the Tigers didn’t make it to the next round, the trip down to Arkansas to play Oklahoma State and the Arkansas Razorbacks allowed the team to play in front of 6,000 to 8,000 fans each game.

“We want to go into the lion’s den,” Bradley said. “We want to go and show our guys what big-time college athletics is all about and show people that, hey, we’re pretty good.”

The Tigers will get their chance on June 3, when the tournament begins. Until then, the team members will take some time off, focus on their exams, recharge their batteries and wait until May 30.