Despite a 1-2 finish in the ACC Baseball Championship last week, Wolfpack head coach Elliott Avent was confident that the NCAA Selection Committee would award his program a regional. On Sunday night, Avent got his wish.
Boosted by the second-toughest schedule in the nation and a fifth-place conference finish in the brutal ACC, the Wolfpack earned the No. 9 overall seed and the right to host its first regional since 2013, when it defeated Rice on its way to Omaha for the College World Series.
“It was a tough year because of the strength of schedule,” Avent said. “I’ll applaud the NCAA. They talk about merit, and this was a year that geography could’ve played a big part because the West needed host sites. They stuck to their guns, and they practiced what they preach.”
However, after playing an incredibly tough schedule, the Wolfpack is rewarded with an incredibly tough regional. The Wolfpack — the No. 1 Raleigh Regional seed — will take on four-seed Navy Friday night. In the other matchup, two-seed Coastal Carolina will face three-seed St. Mary’s. Each team brings something different to the table that makes it dangerous, starting with Navy on Friday night.
The Patriot League Champion, Navy has reached the NCAA Tournament on the backs of its pitching staff. As a whole, the Navy pitching staff has a 2.78 ERA, and the Wolfpack will likely face the toughest arm that Navy has to offer in senior lefthander Luke Gillingham. Gillingham finished the season 8-3 with a 1.96 ERA and eight complete games, four of them complete-game shutouts. The southpaw allowed only one home run in 87.1 innings pitched this season. It will be a battle of goliaths when NC State’s high-powered offense matches up against Navy’s ace.
Coastal Carolina will be a familiar opponent for the Wolfpack, as the two teams met in the second game of the season back in February, a 13-10 Wolfpack victory. The Chanticleers finished with a 44-15 record and are No. 12 in the RPI, boasting wins over regional host Virginia and tournament teams Ohio State, Duke, Wake Forest and UNC-Wilmington.
The Chanticleers can flat out hit, having mashed 89 home runs this season, and are one of the few teams that will be able to match the potent Wolfpack offense hit for hit. The matchup should be a high-scoring fun affair when the two teams meet in the regional.
St. Mary’s will be making its first ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament after winning the West Coast Conference. The Gaels boast a strong pitching staff and are another formidable foe lumped into the regional.
The winner of the double-elimination Raleigh Regional will face the winner of the Baton Rouge Regional, which features LSU, Rice, Southeastern Louisiana and Utah Valley University. If the Wolfpack wins the Raleigh Regional, they will travel to LSU for the Super Regional should the Tigers win, but will host in Raleigh if Rice, Southeastern Louisiana or Utah Valley can upset the nationally-seeded Tigers.
“We play well at home, having our own fans here,” catcher Andrew Knizner said. “It’s definitely not an easy regional, but postseason baseball is never easy.”
The Wolfpack’s road to the Super Regional will depend greatly on the performance of its starting pitching, and a major theme of the Regional will be the health of junior starter Ryan Williamson. On May 29, NC State sports blog Backing the Pack posted that Williamson would need Tommy John surgery and would not pitch in the NCAA Tournament, which was backed by a post on Williamson’s social media accounts that claimed he had torn his UCL.
Avent noted that Williamson was indeed injured, but there may be a chance that he could pitch this weekend.
“He does have a little bit of an injury,” Avent said. “It is an injury that he can pitch with but it’s an injury that’s going to need to be fixed. That’s going to be his and his parents’ call … I don’t want him to make an emotional decision; I want him to make a smart decision.”
Whether or not the report is correct, losing Williamson would be a devastating blow to the Wolfpack’s pitching staff. Sophomore lefthander Brian Brown has struggled lately, and it is not a guarantee that he will revert back to his dominant form he showed earlier this season. Avent will need to lean on junior righty Cory Wilder to pitch a game this weekend, but he would have to with or without Williamson in the rotation.
The real question is whether Avent will turn to junior righthander Johnny Piedmonte, who looked dominate during his save against Georgia Tech, to start a game or if we will see another starter-by-committee approach that Avent used against Miami.
Either way, the pitching staff will be an interesting storyline to monitor as the regional wears on. With four tough teams battling it out in what are undoubtedly going to be highly contested and skilled games, expect whoever advances to have thoroughly earned it.
