FORT MYERS, Fla. — Florida SouthWestern Baseball has made it to the postseason! Look back to the beginning of the season, and there were several obstacles in their way that they battled through to make it this far.
“It’s been interesting,” said FSW head coach Zac Cole. “We’ll just put it that way.”
This year was head coach Zac Cole’s first season with the Buccaneers, and like with any first-year squad he knew there would be ups and downs.
“We knew it was gonna be a tough challenge,” said Cole.
Last year, FSW announced that the baseball and softball teams would be getting brand-new all-turf stadiums. However, in the fall when practices began, they weren’t completed.
“The fall was kind of chaotic,” said FSW sophomore Kelan Hoover. “I mean, we didn’t really have a home field to practice on.”
“We started the fall over at the Lee County Player Development Complex,” said Cole. “Then after the hurricane, our guys were gone for five weeks or so. When we came back we were fortunate enough that Florida Gulf Coast allowed us to use their facility so we spent the fall a little bit everywhere and were all over the place. And that was frustrating.”
After winter break and just two weeks before the season was set to start, more chaos ensued for the Bucs. Of the 28 names on the 2023 roster, zero suited up for any Bucs games last season and there was no set schedule.
“We had about two weeks I think to get ready to play our first game,” said FSW freshman Joel Gardner.
But once the season began and they got into the groove, things started to pick up a bit for FSW.
‘It just really started clicking,” said Gardner. “One through nine started hitting, our pitchers did well, the bullpen was doing great, just playing really good, clean baseball.”
“We got off to kind of a slow start,” said Cole. “As the weather got warmer, we started to heat up a little bit too. And so we’ve kind of recovered as Fort Myers has recovered from the hurricane. So kind of a cool story there.”
“We didn’t want our season to end so we put all we can into the bucket to make the playoffs and that’s what we wanted to do,” said FSW sophomore Derek Williams.
The team notched 31 victories together this season and said that they saw the positives that came from the obstacles.
“I think it kind of gave us a little bit of grit, kind of gave us a little chip on the shoulder,” said Hoover. “So it just kind of worked in our benefit to be honest.”
“Sometimes life forces you to have to overcome things,” said Cole. “That’s kind of what happened here. We didn’t really have a choice. We had our goals and we said at the beginning of the year, we were gonna have to overcome those obstacles along the way and continue to try to reach those goals or we were going to cave to the pressure and fortunately our guys stood up and accepted the challenge.”
FSW will start their postseason run on Friday, May 5 against #3 Central Florida in Ocala.
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