Brown: Early season wins against ranked teams ‘no fluke’
By Colleen Casey
Staff Reporter

Despite beating No. 9 University of Texas and No. 16 Baylor at the Astros College Classic, head coach Lance Brown said it’s too early to tell how well his team will do this season.

“What allowed us to win was great plays and everyone contributing,” Brown said. “But if we play bad this week, we’re back at ground level.”

Special to the Skiff Junior outfielder Terry Trofholz takes a pitch in a game last season. Trofholz paced the Frogs this past weekend in wins over No. 9-ranked Texas and No. 16-ranked Baylor at the Astros College Classic at Enron Field in Houston.

The Frogs are set to play Texas-Arlington at 2 p.m. Tuesday at UTA.

Brown said the team will try to play like they played at the Classic and work toward getting into a rhythm this early in the season.

“We really won’t know how the season will turn out until after about 10 to 15 games,” Brown said. “We’re not going to go psycho preparing for UTA. We’re focusing on doing the things we can do to win.”

Junior left fielder Terry Trofholz said he hopes the players can maintain their level of play in a different atmosphere other than Enron Field, where the Classic was played.

“We weren’t really surprised how hard we played because it was easy to get fired-up to play at Enron,” Trofholz said, “Hopefully we can keep up the intensity, good pitching and solid defense.”

The Frogs opened their season with a loss to Texas Tech on Thursday that kicked off the Classic. Brown said his team had a great chance to win the Texas Tech game but their strike-outs didn’t allow them to.

However, Brown said the team has been playing relaxed, yet hard.

“I didn’t see too much difference from how they played in work-outs and how they played in the games, that’s good,” Brown said. “They’re really a loose group of people.”

Brown said the Frogs played well Friday and Saturday when they beat Texas 8-1 and Baylor 6-5.

Junior third baseman Mike Settle said the young team wasn’t surprised it was able to mesh together well and win.

“We had solid defense and our pitchers worked as hard as they possibly could,” Settle said.

Although the Frogs were ranked seventh in pre-season Conference USA polls, Settle said the team wants to prove that ranking was wrong.

Brown said he hopes that the team is good enough to play good baseball everyday.
“The way we played is no fluke,” Brown said. “Good baseball wins.”

Colleen Casey
c.m.casey@student.tcu.edu

credits

TCU Daily Skiff © 2002