The Briarwood Buccaneers varsity baseball team is in the middle of a crucial stretch of sub-region games.
After wins against Edmund Burke Academy and Gatewood, the Bucs dropped two close region games last week -- one to sub-region foe Brentwood School, 6-5, and the other to region opponent Westminister School, 3-2.
Briarwood also had a game against sub-region leader John Hancock on Tuesday afternoon. See complete coverage of this game in next week's edition of The Mirror.
Today, the Bucs will play host a rematch against Brentwood at 3:30 p.m. and then will travel to Sparta Tuesday for the final sub-region game against John Hancock at 4 p.m.
"We're still in control of our destiny," Coach Charlie May said. "(The loss against Brentwood was) not too damaging, but it put a dent in our plans. We've got to focus and keep fighting."
The Bucs's bats went silent in the losses to Brentwood and Westminister. As a team, they struck out 22 times over the two-day period.
Fatigue played a key role in the Bucs' loss to Westminster, according to Coach May, who said that the Bucs still played a solid ball game overall.
"We got excellent pitching from Blake Stitcher," Coach May said. "He deserved to win the game."
The Bucs jumped to an early 1-0 lead, but Westminister answered and went ahead 3-1 in the fourth. Senior Bob Wills hit the Bucs' first homerun of the season in the sixth, but it wasn't enough to come away with a victory.
The Bucs jumped out to an early 3-0 lead on Brentwood, but four errors and 12 untimely strikeouts led to another loss.
"We've seen it before," said Coach May. "We're putting too much pressure on ourselves to try to hit homeruns when we should be hitting ground balls. We only hit two ground balls in the game."
