Standing atop the Sunshine State Conference with an 18-3 record, the Spartans have only one week left in the regular season.
The Spartan baseball team will face conference rival Florida Southern College Moccasins (FSC), in which they say will be the most important series of the year.
“When I saw that we were playing them for our last conference series, I told all the coaches [that] the conference championship is gonna come down to that last weekend of the season, and that’s where we’re at,” said Spartans’ Head Coach Joe Urso.
Coasting through the middle of the season with a school record of 25 straight wins, the Spartans winning streak ended after a 3-4 loss against Rollins on April 10.
After a tough series battle against another conference rival in Barry, the Spartans lost two of three, Urso said that complacency was the reason for the sudden series loss.
“I think we just got a little bit complacent this weekend, and it showed and it cost us,” Urso said.
Junior pitcher for the Spartans, Sean Bierman, didn’t have a specific reason for the Spartans’ first series loss since late February versus Valdosta State.
“You can’t really put your finger on one thing,” said Bierman. “It was just not the way we usually play.”
Urso believes, however, that the recent conference losses will inevitably help this year’s Spartans find out who they really are.
“Although I’m very disappointed, I think it’s in some ways good that we have to face some adversity,” Urso said. “Now we’re gonna see what this team’s really made of and how they respond.”
Holding a 12-3 conference record, FSC is second only to UT in the SSC standings. Though the Mocs will still have two more weeks of regular season games following the upcoming UT series, the Spartans can likely claim the conference title with a series victory against FSC in their three game set.
Mike Schwartz, the Spartans’ designated hitter, said that the significance of the FSC series is what playing ball is all about.
“This is what we play for,” Schwartz said. “Going into the last weekend, [we] gotta take two out of three against a conference rival [to] win the conference, and that’ll be that.”
Urso understands the importance of this final regular season series, because winning it, and thus winning a conference championship, will accomplish one of the team’s goals that was established at the season’s onset.
“You win two out of three at home and you win a conference championship on your own field and that’s goal number one of our three goals,” Urso said.
The first goal being to win the SSC conference, Urso explained that the second and third team goals were to win regional tournament and then the national championship, respectively.
Urso said that if the team doesn’t strive for those goals one step at a time, an incident like the series loss to Barry may be the result.
“We have to keep those goals in that order without getting ahead of ourselves,” Urso said. “I think some of our guys may have gotten ahead of [themselves] this past weekend and that’s part of the complacency and the setback that I think we had.”
Battling the Mocs on Friday, April 23 at 6 p.m., with a double header on Saturday, April 24 starting at 1 p.m., the Spartans will seek their eighth Sunshine State Conference title since 2000.
Bierman believes that the Friday game will be huge in the Spartans’ chances of taking the entire series.
“We’re gonna have to come out with a lot of energy, in all the games really, but especially on Friday night,” Bierman said. “We’re gonna need to take that first one [to build] momentum into the next two games.”
Daniel Feingold can be reached at dfeingold@ut.edu.