Tuesday, May 10
May 10, 2011Thursday, May 12
May 12, 2011
The prep baseball season is now officially over in the Tri-parish area.
After slugging and pitching their way to the Class 3A quarterfinals for the second-straight season, the area’s lone survivor, the No. 6-seed E.D. White Cardinals were eliminated Saturday afternoon in the round of eight, dropping a 10-2 game to No. 3 Holy Cross.
The loss ends the Cardinals’ season with a 24-11 record, something E.D. White’s coach Shane Trosclair said defines his team more-so than a rough Saturday afternoon.
“Success has sort of become the expectation here. E.D. White is a special place to play baseball and I’m truly honored to be the coach at E.D. White,” Trosclair said. “We have a lot of talent and a lot of coachable kids and they set their goals at the beginning of the season and they wanted to win 20 games, win a district championship and to win a state championship and we were one game away from making our return trip back there. They accomplished two of their three goals and there are not a lot of teams who get to say that they can do that.”
The Cardinals’ chase for the elusive third goal didn’t initially start too bad.
The Tigers got on the scoreboard first with a solo home run in the bottom of the second inning.
But E.D. White wasn’t shaken by the early run, tying the score at 1 in the top of the third inning when Jacob Clement plated Jacob Rodrigue on a fielder’s choice ground ball out.
But the Tigers exploded for nine more runs over the next three innings to put the game away for good and to move to the semifinals.
The loss ended the careers of six E.D. White seniors.
Trosclair said it’s always difficult to give a parting speech to seniors every season, but added this particular group has nothing to hang its head about.
“They’ve been with me for three years and I told them, ‘Guys, you’ve won 79 games, you’ve won three district championships and you went to the quarterfinals twice and to the semifinals once,'” Trosclair said. “I told them to not let one game, or one loss define their high school career. I told them that when they look back at their high school careers, don’t say first that you lost the last game that you played, say first that you had an exceptional career.”
But more important than losing this group on the field, Trosclair said the 2011 team will always be special for another reason.
The coach lost both his mother and father in the past 12 months. He added that without the camaraderie and support from his players, his grieving process wouldn’t have been the same.
“I lost my father Nov. 3rd and I lost my mother Jan. 24th,” Trosclair said. “This team has been with me through the lowest point in my life and it truly became a family to me. They witnessed me bury two parents. It wasn’t more than two days after I buried my mom that I was back on the field with them starting my grieving process. They definitely made it easier by being a joy to be around. We definitely bonded as the season went on and we have a special relationship because of all of the things we’ve been through together. This team will always be special to me.”
Elsewhere in the Tri-parish area:
Before Holy Cross eliminated E.D. White, they also feasted on another Tri-parish team, eliminating Berwick 6-0 in the second round of the Class 3A playoffs.
The Panthers were one of two St. Mary parish teams to have poor luck in the second round of the playoffs, being joined by Central Catholic, who fell 13-3 to St. John in Class 1A.
While other classifications played their second and third rounds this week, Class 5A played its first and second rounds.
For teams in our area, no one saw the second round, as Central Lafourche and Thibodaux were both eliminated.
The Trojans dropped a 12-2 game to the state’s top seed Catholic of Baton Rouge, while Thibodaux lost 10-0 to No. 9-seed Mandeville.
E.D. White’s Jacob Rodrigue slides under the tag of the Erath first baseman during last Tuesday’s second round playoff matchup. The Cardinals’ season ended a few days later in a 10-2 loss against Holy Cross in the Class 3A quarterfinals. CASEY GISCLAIR
