Ed Yates

The league is going to be tough, but, if you look at last year, the league helped prepare us for what we were up against in the tournament. It's tough teams all the way through, and that's good. It's a tough league.

For Colton, I think the offensive part of his game is going to be OK if he doesn't come in putting too much pressure on himself. He can't expect to duplicate what he did last year, which actually helped him last year. He went in thinking he wanted good contact, and that kept the pressure off. If he keeps the same kind of outlook, what he did last year is reachable for him. It really is.

Overall I thought both teams played well. The score was only 4-1 until the seventh when we broke it open.

Overall I thought we played pretty well. For us to get this win, it's a good one to start off with against a good team.

We did what we came here to do. We didn't win the league, but we did what we came to do today.

If you remember, he really started coming on at the end of last year. He hit the ball real well again today. We only had two hits through the first five innings, and he had them both.

He cruised through the first like they weren't even here. Then all of a sudden, here comes the second and he was struggling getting his curve over. I was warming up some people, because I told my assistants if he can't get his curve over, we're screwed. He's the type of pitcher who has to work some of his off-speed stuff. If he can't get it across, it's going to be a long night for us.

The good news is that there is some experience there today that we should be able to pull out of the game. And I sure hope we do.

I thought that was a big mistake on their part.

That's not bad for a freshman. The two he walked were in the fifth. We threw one of them out trying to steal and we turned a double play to get the other one.

Overall he pitched real well. He only had two walks. The wind was blowing pretty hard, but overall I thought we played pretty good defense behind him.

Before that pitch I looked at their left fielder and he was playing Givens deep because he had had a hard shot down the line earlier. I looked at the shortstop, because my concern was not the left fielder. I knew darn well he couldn't get to it. My question was, could the shortstop get to it It took me just a second and I was able to determine there's no way a shortstop could get that.