The first weekend of the season for NCAA Division I baseball teams was a pretty good one for the state's 11 teams at that level. Only Winthrop, which lost three at nationally ranked Mississippi, failed to get a win.
Clemson, Coastal Carolina, College of Charleston and Furman all went 3-0.
Clemson took three one-run games from William & Mary, sparked by a late-inning rally in the series opener to force extra innings. The Tigers trailed 4-1 with two outs and no one on base in the ninth inning of Friday's game, but rallied to force extra innings and the eventual victory. Jake Higginbotham retired the first 16 batters he faced Sunday after missing the 2017 season with an injury.
Coastal Carolina had a pair of 10-inning 4-3 wins in the Baseball at the Beach Tournament. College of Charleston swept Southeast Missouri State in Chad Holbrook's debut at the helm. One of Sunday's spectators was longtime Holbrook friend Roy Williams, men's basketball coach at North Carolina.
Furman got a pair of one-run wins over Marist. In Sunday's finale, Jason Costa hit a walk-off home runs in the 10th.
South Carolina bounced back from an opening loss to VMI to win the final two games of Mark Kingston's first series as coach. The Gamecocks hit six home runs and drew 30 walks. One negative was a hamstring injury to senior shortstop Madison Stokes, who had three doubles and two massive home runs on the weekend.
The Citadel's Tony Skole won in his debut as head coach at his alma mater, getting a 3-0 victory over George Mason on the strength of a three-run eighth inning.
USC Upstate went 1-2-1 on the weekend, but missed out on a chance to knock off nationally ranked Kentucky in the opener of a Saturday doubleheader. The Spartans had a 5-0 lead after three innings before the Wildcats rallied to force extra innings and win in the 10th, 6-5.
On the NCAA Division II level, Coker went 3-0 on the weekend to improve to 8-1 on the season. Southern Wesleyan continued its solid start, winning two of three over Virginia Wise to go to 8-3.
Lander held on to beat Young Harris, 4-2, on Sunday after getting pounded the first two games. North Greenville took two of three at Newberry to move to 6-3.
In NJCAA, Florence-Darlington Tech hosted a solid field for the first weekend of its Stinger Invitational and went 3-1. Spartanburg Methodist had a tough weekend, going 0-3 against a challenging field in a tournament in Alabama.
USC Sumter went 2-2 against a traditionally strong Harford team. USC Salkehatchie capped a 2-4 week by beating Wake Tech twice in what Indians coach Bubba Dorman called two of their best games of the season.
A few other observations
* Maybe the only downer to the weekend from my perspective was neither Clemson nor South Carolina had video streaming for its Sunday game because of conflicts with other on-campus events and a lack of necessary production resources. My fallback option was Furman, but there was an issue getting Airplay to work on my Apple TV, meaning I had to follow the Paladins on an Ipad mini and stream the Winthrop-Mississippi game on my TV. With that being said, availability of college baseball has come a long way. It wasn't that many years ago that few local college games were on the radio until Clemson and/or South Carolina reached the postseason.
* If you don't have some way of streaming WatchESPN or other Internet content to your television, I highly recommend you get one. ESPN plans to have more than 800 college games over its platforms, and there are many, many other games over portals such as Livestream, Stretch Internet, YouTube and various conference sites.
* We got to take our five-year-old granddaughter to her first college baseball game on Friday. Thanks to the playground at Founders Park, frozen treats and a photo op with Cocky, she lasted two hours before hitting the wall. Not bad for a first outing.
* I wrote before the season I wasn't going to go down the rabbit hole of spending all my time chasing scores, but that's exactly what I wound up doing after I got home from my weekend road trip on Saturday. I'm going to try to avoid a repeat of that.
* D1Baseball.com has been the go-to source for NCAA Division I baseball scores for the last few seasons. The site has thrown a curveball this year, charging a $9.99 subscription fee for season-long access to the scores. Sure, it's not quite a sawbuck, but I hate paying for online content. I'm going to chew on it a few days. Thankfully, nine of the state's 11 schools are great about providing Twitter updates. The other two? Not so much. I'm not going to name names, but most of you who follow all the state teams will have a pretty good idea who I'm referring to.
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