MONTGOMERY, Ala. – As Southern Miss went into the bottom of the ninth with the game tied 6-6, Danny Lynch gathered his team and gave a simple message.
"It's not really about how you have done to this point," said Lynch, who is the team's senior captain. "It's about this. The game is tied at six."
Fittingly enough, with runners at first and second and one out, Lynch delivered a walk-off RBI hit to defeat Troy 7-6 and send the Golden Eagles to the Sun Belt tournament semifinals.
But Lynch's point proved to be true heading into the final inning as Slade Wilks, Christopher Sargent, and himself were a combined 0-for-10, with the only production being a pair of walks drawn by Sargent. And yet Wilks delivered his first hit while Sargent drew a walk to set up Lynch's game-winner even after his team gave up three runs in the eighth inning to tie the game.
"It's about staying in the middle of the ring," Lynch said. "Whether I have a bad at-bat 10 times in a row, I'm going to be just as confident going up the 11th time as well as the first time.
"When you implode like we did in the eighth, we played bad defense. (Justin) Storm did his job, and we just gave up runs. It's easy to start freaking out, everybody going crazy and doing too much instead of just going back to what we always do. We always try to relax and have good at-bats… I think that's the biggest thing is staying positive and not freaking out because you have one bad inning."
However, the game's finish just illustrated the back-and-forth matchup between the two teams.
"Our guys were resilient," Southern Miss coach Scott Berry said. "They were a couple of innings where they weathered the storm. There were a couple of innings where we scored and then didn't get the shutdown inning, and credit Troy for that."
Troy (39-19) got on the board first after a wild pitch set up a 2-out RBI single, but the Golden Eagles responded with a pair of runs in the third as Matthew Etzel and Dustin Dickerson delivered back-to-back RBI singles.
In the fourth inning, Carson Paetow nearly robbed a potential home run, but instead, the ball fell out of his glove as he hit the wall, which turned into a triple for Troy. USM's starting pitcher Billy Oldham then threw a wild pitch which tied the game at 2-2.
Dickerson maintained the offensive momentum for Southern Miss (39-16) as he came up with an RBI double in the fifth. After Troy evened the score in the sixth inning, USM plated three runs with a 2-run RBI double from Blake Johnson and an RBI single from Matthew Etzel to give USM a 6-3 lead.
In the eighth inning, the Trojans led by reaching base on an error by Dustin Dickerson, which set up an RBI single. A second throwing error allowed another run to score before Troy capped off the inning by driving in a run on a fielder's choice.
"I'm proud of the inside leadership that we have," Berry said. "We self-destructed in that eighth inning, and Troy took advantage of it. I think at the end of the day, we got off the mat. We got off the ropes. However, you want to (say it). We brought the fight back in the middle of the ring. We were able to deliver that last blow."
The Golden Eagles will now have Friday off and await to play the winner of Texas State and Troy on Saturday at 9 a.m.
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