That first weekend of April had been a disaster for the Chattanooga State baseball team, much as had the last weekend of March. Before losing the first two games of the late-March trip to Southwest Tennessee Community College, the Tigers were 8-1 in TCCAA games.
But after salvaging the last game of the weekend in Memphis, the Tigers were in even worse shape in their return to West Tennessee a week later, falling 13-2 and 18-6 at Jackson State and trailing 9-1 in the final game of that series.
But that eight-run deficit turned into a 14-11 win, Chattanooga State won a doubleheader against nationally fourth-ranked Walters State the next weekend, finished a second-best 17-7 in league play and also finished second to Walters in the TCCAA/NJCAA Region VII tournament. That put them in the four-team East Central District playoffs starting today at Walters' field in Morristown, Tenn., where the Tigers open at 11 a.m. against 14th-ranked Darton State, the Georgia regular-season and tournament champion.
South Georgia State is the fourth team in the tournament deciding who represents the district in the Junior College World Series at Grand Junction, Calif. The Hawks play Walters at 3 p.m. in the double-elimination tournament.
"I feel good about where we are," Chattanooga State coach Greg Dennis said Tuesday. "We're in as good a position as we could be in -- in a final-four situation -- and the last five or six weeks we've played pretty well. Hopefully we've got a little more left over."
Dennis acknowledged that the big comeback at Jackson State was a "pretty defining time," coupled with the follow-up wins over Walters.
"We were down 9-1 in the fifth or sixth, and their guy was really throwing well," Dennis said. "We were just struggling. I think it was just that we started grinding every at-bat, and then a couple of hits went our way and then we put some more together and it was a complete momentum swing."
Andy Clay, who plays second base and pitches some in relief for the Tigers, said that turnaround at Jackson "changed the whole way we thought about this year." They "could have" got the season back on its early track even after a three-game sweep to the eventual fourth-place TCCAA team, "but it would have been tougher -- a whole tougher.
"We had lost games we shouldn't have lost, and that was unacceptable, but we closed out the season well."
Clay praised the closeness and "character" of the team, including a "selfless" approach to similar goals.
The sophomore from Loganville, Ga., has a .347 batting average with 24 walks, 38 runs scored, 24 RBIs and 21 stolen bases in 26 attempts. First baseman Michael Goss and third baseman JoJo Underwood, both of whom came from Cartersville High, are batting .356 and .322 with 38 and 42 RBIs, and right fielder/reliever David Mayo is hitting .321 with 34 RBIs and 34 runs.
Chaz Vesser, Thomas "Nate" Schmal and Michael Halley also are above .300.
East Tennessee State transfer Austin Hutchison, who arrived in January, heads the pitching staff with an 8-3 record and a 2.22 earned run average in 81 innings.
"Getting Austin at mid-term was a huge pickup for us," Dennis said of ETSU's Friday starter in 2014. "That let us move everybody down one spot."
Clay, who played third last year, "has blossomed at second and been what we thought he would be last year -- a catalyst, a rear end for other teams," Dennis said.
"And Goss started really poorly, but the last 10-12 games he has been what we expected him to be."
"This spring was such a dysfunctional time," Dennis said. "We had three weeks off for the weather, and we lost 18 games from the schedule, plus having so many others pushed back. We were still trying to figure things out the end of March and early April that we normally would have figured out a month earlier.
"We knew we had some good sophomores and a good group of younger kids, but I think until adversity hits you just don't know how they will respond. This group did a really nice job of sucking it up and turning adversity into a character-building situation."
Goss called the after-midnight, 10th-inning victory for the Tigers that ultimately sealed their spot in the district "a great team win. We had adversity all game but just kept battling back. We never got down on ourselves.
"Our strength is the balance of hitting and pitching. We don't have a superstar who's just going to go out and win us the game. But if we do what we're supposed to do -- we've got talent and we've worked hard -- we're going to have a good chance of winning."
Contact Ron Bush at rbush@timesfreepress.com.