LEBANON, Tenn. — Of all the incredible numbers Tate Surber has put up in his athletic career, the most impressive may have been the smallest.
Surber, who is McKenzie High School’s career scoring leader in boys’ basketball (1,651 points) and earned the Tennessee Titans Mr. Football award for TSSAA Class 1A after totaling more than 3,100 yards and 46 touchdowns this past season, quieted Whitwell’s bats Wednesday, allowing just two hits in a 6-1 baseball state tournament opener at Wilson Central.
“Surber is a competitor,” Whitwell coach Chad Billingsley said. “You can tell he’s a confident competitor. He throws an upper 80s to low 90s fastball and has a great off-speed pitch that makes him really tough.
“We had heard that they only wanted him to throw about 70 to 75 pitches, so we wanted to take him deep into counts and try to get him out as early as we could and then jump on them once he came out. But we weren’t as aggressive at the plate as we could have been at times and, even though it was still close, I guess our morale was down by the time he came out.”
The baseball state tournaments at the TSSAA Spring Fling got underway a day later than originally planned, with Tuesday’s schedule of games wiped out by weather. In Whitwell’s case, it’s the first state tournament appearance in program history.