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June 5, 2012Locals named to All-State team
June 5, 2012
Nicholls State baseball coach Seth Thibodeaux has a lump in the pit of his stomach.
It’s an uncontrollable knot that will dictate his actions for the entire summer.
The Colonels didn’t reach the Southland Conference Tournament in 2012, instead finishing the season with just a 26-28 record.
Those numbers are not statistics of endearment for the Colonels’ second-year coach, who vowed this week that Nicholls would be better in the future.
“There’s a huge sting in my chest right now,” Thibodeaux said. “I’ll probably never get over the feeling that I have right now. Hopefully my team feels the same way. … I hope every time our guys lift this summer or run this summer, they remember this feeling. I hope every time our guys do anything baseball related that this sting in our gut just lingers. Heartbreak can make you better if you use it in a productive way.
“I promise you that as the coach of this program, I will never take another thing for granted. We will never take another day for granted. We never want to feel this way ever again.”
Strong 2011 bred hopeful 2012
Coming into the season, everyone within the Colonels’ program thought that this was the year the team would achieve greatness.
Nicholls snuck into the Southland Conference Tournament as the No. 8 seed in 2011 – the last team in the field.
Then the Colonels struck fire and won their first two games, beating No. 1-seed Texas State and No. 5- seed Sam Houston State in the process, by a combined 10-1 margin.
Nicholls bowed out of the tournament and lost its next two games, but with a slew of returnees from the 2011 squad, a list including ace pitcher Seth Webster and top slugger Jeremy Hill, everyone had high hopes that the 2012 team would be able to get over the hump.
“We really believed we could win the conference,” Thibodeaux said. “Looking back, just at our roster and our players within our club, I still do think we could have won the conference.”
The first month of the season proved that Thibodeaux’s thoughts about his club were probably true.
Nicholls won a game against Southern Miss in the opening weekend of the season. They also won two of three games against NCAA Tournament team UL-Monroe.
They took that momentum into the Southland slate and won two games against Southeastern Louisiana, who eventually emerged as the league’s regular season runner-up.
But right around the start of Southland play, the Colonels’ roster was bitten by the most potent insect in sports – the injury bug.
Both Nicholls’ starting and backup catchers Evan Weibel and Cody Dufrene were sent to the shelf with injuries.
So was Leo Vargas, who had seen time at shortstop and was a player Thibodeaux believed could be an All-Conference Player.
In the outfield, Nicholls wasn’t immune as centerfielder Matt Richard dealt with chronic back issues and Tri-parish native Mike Barba suffered a concussion.
“You lose your catcher and you lose your shortstop and you lose your centerfielder – that’s really the gut of your team right there,” Thibodeaux said. “Right up the middle, everything we had planned coming into the season was gone.
“To not be healthy for basically the full season, that was really a painful experience because we really believe that when full strength, we had a team that right up there among the best in our conference.”
With a depleted depth chart, the Colonels’ performance started to falter.
After beating Southeastern to start league play, Nicholls lost seven of its next eight conference series to drop the team to 9-15 in the league.
To make matters worse, Nicholls was not being ransacked in most of its losses, but was instead losing one and two-run games.
The Colonels finished the season 4-10 in Southland games decided by two runs or fewer.
“We never got on a streak,” Thibodeaux said. “We just never really got hot. And that was the really frustrating part for us. A lot of it had to do with injuries, yes. But a lot of it also had to do with us overlooking a lot of things. That’s what happened. We got ourselves in a rut a little bit and it put us in a spot where we had to make up some ground late in the season.”
Missing the tournament by one at-bat
With their season in jeopardy, the Colonels knew they needed to make up ground in their final nine Southland games.
Their first series was lukewarm, as Nicholls split two games with the University of Texas-San Antonio, with the third game lost to rain.
Not having the third game served as a disadvantage to the Colonels, who needed as many wins as they could collect down the stretch.
“We really thought we had the edge in that game looking at the pitching matchups and everything,” Thibodeaux said. “We really wanted to get that game in.”
The Colonels rebounded the next weekend and won two of three games against Northwestern State, which pushed the team into the final weekend series of the year with Stephen F. Austin knowing they must win the series to reach the conference tournament field.
“We went there knowing that it was all or nothing, do or die,” Thibodeaux said.
Nicholls’ weekend in Nacogdoches, Texas, started fine as Webster fired a complete game victory for a Thursday afternoon 7-2 win.
But 24 hours later, Stephen F. Austin answered back with a 7-2 win of its own, which meant Saturday’s season finale would dictate whether the Colonels reached the Southland Conference Tournament.
And it all came down to one pitch.
With both the Colonels and Lumberjacks tied at 4 in the bottom of the ninth, Stephen F. Austin hitter Ricardo Sanchez stepped into the box with one out and a runner on second base.
Nicholls senior pitcher Brad Delatte stood on the rubber for the Colonels.
On the first pitch of the at-bat, Sanchez roped a ball into right centerfield, which scored Freddy Villalobos and ended Nicholls’ season.
Dejected Colonels somberly walked off the field in heartbreak following the defeat.
Thibodeaux sat in the dugout and felt a familiar feeling in his chest.
“It just seemed like that last game was the telltale of our season,” Thibodeaux said. “We gave a lot of games away like that. Did it hurt? Heck yes it hurt. But you know what? We should have never been in that situation because we had plenty of chances to take care of our business weeks before that game and we never capitalized.”
With the heartbreak now more than two weeks old, Thibodeaux said he is already eyeing the 2013 season.
With a healthy roster that returns the core of 2012’s team, the coach said he believes the team can make another run.
He added a few philosophical changes he expects within the program next season.
The first is that he vows Nicholls will not feel entitled – something he believes the team battled at times in 2012.
The second is a winning mentality.
The coach said he will break the stigma that just reaching the conference tournament is the accomplishment the team seeks to obtain.
Whether he’s successful reaching those goals – that remains to be seen.
But Thibodeaux surely doesn’t sound like a man who is ready to be rid of his bellyache – a sting he plans to carry with him deep into the summer and early into the fall.
“I’m excited,” he said. “I’m ready. I wish we could have started practice yesterday. I want to prove to a lot of people that this year was a fluke and last year was not a fluke. We just want to be playing at this time of the year. It’s painful for me to turn on the TV right now and see these teams out there with their dreams still in tact. We want that to be us. We want our dreams to come true around here. And they will.
“The future of this program is bright. It hurts right now and it stings – everyday it stings a little more. But like I said before, we can use this sting to be stronger and we’re going to win every day between now and next season to get back to this spot next year. We owe that to ourselves.”
A Nicholls State base-runner dives head-first into home plate during a game this season. The Colonels took a bit of a fall as a team in 2012, missing the Southland Conference Tournament. Nicholls coach Seth Thibodeaux said he believes the team will reverse its fortunes next year and will compete for the top prize in the league and also a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
