Logan County and Russellville will play two more Clashes of the Cats this year. They are paired in both the softball and baseball tournament opening games in a couple of weeks in Franklin.
After Wednesday’s district business meeting, both Logan teams are the number one seed and both RHS teams the number four seed.
As was the case in the basketball seedings, the Logan girls team went undefeated in regular season district play while the boys team was subject to a tiebreaker by finishing 5-1. And once again, LCHS won the toss.
So, Franklin-Simpson and Todd Central will meet in the second opening round games of the two divisions.
Those making the schedules decided to administer a collective insulting slap in the face to the fans of all four schools, scheduling the softball and baseball tournaments at basically the same time. They basically said, “You can’t be a fan of both sports. You have to choose one.”
So, RHS and LCHS will play the first game on Monday, May 21, and F-S and Todd will play the second game that night. The championship games will start 30 minutes apart on Tuesday, May 22.
Baseball
The Cougars (19-7) will go into the tournament as heavy favorites over the Panthers (2-15). Coach Ethan Meguiar’s team has outscored Russellville 47-0 in their two regular season Clashes. The Cougars returned most of the key players from last year’s regional finalist team. Russellville’s wins have come over winless Caverna 12-0 and 10-0. Coach Tyler Meacham’s young, inexperienced Panthers have been outscored 245-17 in their 15 losses.
Franklin is 19-7 after having lost 4-2 to the Cougars before winning 3-2 over LCHS in 10 innings. Todd Central is 3-17 with two of the wins coming over RHS.
Softball
While the LCHS-RHS matchup in baseball was anything but a surprise, but the two schools being paired in softball was not expected. Because of a tiebreaker, the Lady Panthers became the lowest seed, even though they had beaten Todd Central three times (counting the Class A regional).
The problem, says RHS Coach Ryan Davenport, is that Russellville lost both of its games to Franklin-Simpson, including 13-3 a few weeks ago. Meanwhile Todd Central, which had gone 0-4 against the two teams from the Land of Logan, swept its two games with F-S.
A three-way tie is broken my margin of victory, Davenport explains.
So Coach Mark Wood’s Lady Cougars ran the table at 6-0 in the district while the other three teams went 2-. Logan’s reward for perfection is to have to play RHS, which has the won the same number of games overall (14) as the Lady Cougars.
See the Roy’s Sports Calendar on The LoJo for times of the games on May 21 and 22.