#10/#8 Baseball ready to face Louisiana Christian in RRAC play

The UHV baseball team understands the challenge ahead.

The No. 10-ranked Jaguars head to Pineville, Louisiana, to face Louisiana Christian, the defending Red River Athletic Conference tournament champion, in a three-game conference series. Last year, UHV dropped the series in heartbreaking fashion with two walk offs by the Wildcats.

This year, UHV (25-4, 14-1) enters the series with LCU (16-14, 6-6) with a half-game lead over No. 1-ranked LSU Shreveport and a series win could go a long way to the Jaguars' title hopes.

"LCU is the reigning conference tournament champions and we know they're going to play some good baseball," said head coach Jonathan Stavinoha. "We went up there last year and got walked off twice in one day. It's kind of stuck with us a little bit. So, we're going into this series fired up, not only to go back there, but to improve on what we've been doing this season. We've got to play our brand of baseball and be locked in for every pitch in all three games."

Stavinoha looks for his starting rotation of Brady Parker, Jonathan Jones and Julian Garcia to continue to set the tone this week.

UHV's pitching staff ranks fourth nationally with a 3.19 ERA.

Parker leads the nation in strikeouts with 72. Senior Mason Longoria leads the nation in wins with eight after picking up a pair in a sweep of RRAC foe Texas A&M-Texarkana last week.

Parker and Jones are atop the RRAC leaderboard in ERA with marks of 1.69 and 1.90, respectively.

"We've got 100% confidence in our starters and our guys in the bullpen," Stavinoha said. "Having that really makes you want to play even better on offense, so they feed off each other. It's going to be exciting because (LCU) has some guys that can play and they seem to be playing good baseball at the right time and so are we."

UHV's offense ranks 18th nationally, hitting .344 as a team. The Jaguars' 259 runs this season leads the Red River Athletic Conference and ranks 17th in the NAIA.

The Jaguars have 10 players hitting over .300 and nine with 10 or more RBIs this season. Hal Perez's 33 RBIs leads the team and ranks second in the RRAC. Cristian Garcia is third nationally with a .506 batting average and has reached base in each of the 29 games he's played this season.

Terry Burrel III (6), Jean Michael Gonzalez (5), Rafael Gutierrez (6) and Jackson Purcell (5) enter the weekend with extended hitting streaks.

Gutierrez was named RRAC Player of the Week on Monday after hitting .636 with a pair of grand slams and 11 RBIs in the sweep of A&M-Texarkana. Purcell is hitting .500 with three RBIs over the last five games, including multi-hit performances in each of the last four games. Both have been producing those numbers from the bottom half of the lineup.

"They've been able to flip it to the top," Stavinoha said. "All the way through, everybody's kind of feeding off each other. You can't say enough about how Purcell and Raf have performed the last couple of weeks and beyond. They're getting hot at the right time and that's what it takes to play championship-style baseball. If we can piggyback off of them and keep this thing rolling, we're going to be pretty good."