Mark Kingston believes South Carolina is firmly in the NCAA Tournament field after a 10-5 win against Alabama in the opening round of the SEC Tournament on Tuesday. The Gamecocks now have at least two more games to play before going home to continue to boost their resume.
South Carolina earned a top 25 RPI victory by beating Alabama and moves on to face Arkansas, the No. 2 RPI team, on Wednesday. It improved its overall record to 33-21 and, Kingston said postgame, left no doubt about whether it belongs in the tournament.
“I think it means I’ll stop having to read every article that Mark Etheridge puts out there and figuring out every last data point and comparing one-loss records and RPIs and strength of schedules,” the Gamecocks coach said. “I thought we were solidly in before. I think this just makes it a slam dunk. Now I think the focus changes to, ‘What happens is we go on a run?’ Can we get in that top 12 RPI now, which could be conceivable considering the teams we’re gonna play. It’s amazing what a fine line this can be in our league.”
South Carolina fell behind 3-0 after the first two innings against Alabama, but responded with a six-run third inning to jump ahead for good. Even more impressive, all six of those runs came off of three homers, including a grand slam from Dalton Reeves.
Alabama responded with a pair of runs in the bottom of the fourth to make it 6-5, but that was the last it would score all game as the Gamecocks defense tightened up the remainder of the way. Chris Veach closes the final 5.2 innings for South Carolina at pitcher, allowing only three hits and no runs to earn the win.
It was a much-needed victory for a Gamecocks team that entered the SEC Tournament on a six-game losing streak after being swept by Tennessee and Georgia. Kingston hopes it will give the team some momentum as they aim to make some noise the rest of the week.
“What it does to our pysche, I’m just glad our guys got rewarded for enduring the hardships that we’ve had over the last couple of weeks because it feels good to win, man,” he said. “It really does. It’s hard to win in this league. Really hard. So I’m just glad the guys got to experience that.
“The No. 1 motivation for them was they didn’t want to have another seven hour bus ride like we had yesterday to get here. They didn’t want to have to get on that thing and head back to Columbia today. Now they know they’re gonna be here for a little while and I’m really happy they’re going to experience everything this tournament is.”
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