Today just stunk, but I want to share one positive. A BIG positive in my mind.

In a tournament format like this one, there are formal interview sessions after each game. Because of Covid, they occur on a Zoom call even though the participants are right down the hall from the reporter(s).

Today, someone decided that Jayme Bailey would be the VT representative (in addition to Coach D'Amour) and that could not have been an easy assignment. Jayme went one for three today with a couple of strikeouts, including a big one in the first inning.

But the young lady was awesome – really, really awesome.

She took responsibility for today and said the team would learn from it and move on. She handled the interview with grace and class and I’m not sure I could have even done the interview and I have years and years (and years) of experience on her. She made me very, very proud.

Here is a sampling of some of her comments:

*Cagle has a really good dropball and a really good riseball and one of them is off-speed, so you've kind of got to go up there looking for her best pitch and then tip your cap if she throws anything else because she just has some really good pitches. We had some hard-hit balls but didn't get it done.

*If we swing at strikes and we swing hard, we're going to hit balls hard and we're going to get on base. But, she (Cagle) had pretty good command of both pitches, so I think a lot of us were swinging at some bad pitches.

*We've just got to work on getting the ball in play and cashing in when we need to.

*The past few times when we’ve lost, we’ve bounced back even better. We're going to take this, learn from what we did and just keep moving on. We've just got to do better next time.

*We definitely had a shot early - we had two people on base and didn’t get it done – including a strikeout by me…We just need to work on getting the ball in play.

*What we really want to win is in the NCAA tournament. We’re just putting the past behind us and moving onto the next opponent…Sunday we’ll see who we’re getting and go from there.

Good job, Jayme. There's no doubt in my mind that this young lady is going to be successful in the game of life.

And there’s no doubt in my mind that the ladies will bounce back – with a vengeance.

Let's Go Hokies!

I'll have Pete's comments up a little later.



[Post edited by VTChip at 05/14/2021 8:25PM]