Northwest can’t keep lead vs. ER

By Bill Kiser
Kannapolis Citizen
Northwest Cabarrus head coach Joe Hubbard knows he has the pieces for a pretty good baseball team, and his players know it, too.
But Hubbard said its just a matter of getting all those pieces playing together and playing smart ball over the second half of the season if the Trojans want to have a chance at winning the NPC title.
Northwest Cabarrus, which was 9-4 overall and 5-3 in the NPC entering the week, saw its three-game winning streak snapped in a 5-4 loss to league leader East Rowan on April 1. A scheduled game against Lake Norman on April 4 was postponed because of wet field conditions.
Against East, the Trojans jumped out to a 4-0 lead after four innings behind the arm of right-hander Ryan Overcash, who struck out 11 before coming out in the fifth inning, and Grayson Thompson’s three-run homer in the third inning.
But the Mustangs fought back, taking advantage of five Northwest errors and scoring the game-tying and game-winning runs in the bottom of the seventh inning to remain undefeated in conference play.
“We had been doing things very well, but we kinda blew apart,” Hubbard said of the loss. “We pitched it well enough to win and hit it well enough to win, but we just didn’t play defense.
“With a team like East Rowan, any time you give them opportunities, they’re going to take advantage of them. We make an error here and make an error there — and we wind up losing the game. That was a game we probably should’ve won if we’d played defense, but they did what they had to do — put the ball in play, kept battling and took advantage of our mistakes.”
The Trojans didn’t get a chance to work out any bugs on the practice field last week because of the weather, which left most fields in the area a soggy mess.
“It was just one of those weeks,” Hubbard said. “Every time it did clear up a little bit, it was still nasty.”
“One day we tried to practice, and it started raining on us. We stayed out there as it misted on us, and finally it started raining. So we went to the batting cage and hit a little bit, then called it a day.”
Things won’t be much better this week — Northwest has three games on its schedule: against Lake Norman on Monday (the game from last week), at South Rowan on Tuesday and versus West Rowan on Friday.
“Hopefully we’ve learned from our mistakes,” Hubbard said.