For a brief moment, the news that Texas Southern would have to travel to Baton Rouge, La. in the NCAA baseball tournament was disappointing, but the Tigers quickly began focusing on the school's second postseason trip.
"It's a shock. We wanted to be at Rice, but we'll start working on the next phase of our season,"
said Tigers coach Candy Robinson, whose team will play Louisiana State on Friday. "It doesn't matter where we play, we just have to show up."
With just 16 wins, TSU enters the tournament with the fewest victories of any school since the NCAA expanded the event in 1999. The Tigers earned the Southwestern Athletic Conference's automatic bid after defeating rival Prairie View last week and take on an LSU team (43-16) that is riding a 20-game winning streak.
The two schools will be joined in Baton Rouge by Southern Mississippi and New Orleans.
Sam Houston State, which won the Southland Conference tournament on Saturday, will make the 70-mile drive south of Huntsville to play in the Rice regional, where the Bearkats (37-23) will take on Conference USA regular season champion Rice (42-13) on Friday. This marks the fifth time Sam Houston has appeared in the NCAA tournament, including last year when the Bearkats lost to Ole Miss in the regional finals.
Texas and St. John's will join Sam Houston and Rice at Reckling Park.
"This is a heck of a regional with Rice and Texas,"
said Bearkats coach Mark Johnson. "Both have great ballclubs. We don't know much about St. John's right now, but we're going to find out more soon. As Big East regular season champions, they'll be a solid ball club as well."
Sam Houston split two games with Rice this season, winning 13-12 in Huntsville on March 4 and losing a 3-2 contest in Houston on April 22.
