Game 1: Post-Game Quotes

June 3, 2005

NCAA Regional (Clemson, SC) Game 1: #1 Clemson vs. #4 North Carolina A&T Post-Game Quotes

Clemson Head Coach, Jack Leggett “It was a tough ballgame. My hat’s off to North Carolina A&T. I thought their kid pitched extremely well. They did what they had to do by putting a little pressure on us early in the ballgame. They made all the plays defensively. I was pleased with how our team played, especially considering we haven’t played great coming off four or five days of rest. It took us a little while to get into it. Stephen Faris, Daniel Moskos, and Stephen Clyne pitched very well for us. We were very patient and kept our poise.

“We had only three hits up until that eight-run inning that we had. Finally we got the leadoff man on base, and bunted him over. Daniel Pritchard made a nice read on the ball dropping in (on the Harbin single). After that the floodgates kind of opened. We started swinging the bats pretty well after that. But you have to give them credit, they played a tough ballgame.”

Clemson Third Baseman, Herman Demmink “It was natural for a lot of us to get pretty anxious at the plate. We had a couple of bad breaks in the field. We may not have read some balls as well as we could have. At the plate, we were starting to swing at balls out of the zone. Coach Leggett was trying to keep us calm, which I thought we did. We started seeing balls up in the zone and capitalized on it.”

Clemson Left Fielder, Tyler Colvin “I have been struggling with the bat. I’ve been real anxious at the plate lately and swinging at a lot of bad pitches. It showed again today in my first few at-bats. We luckily got to him when his pitch count got up. He left the ball up and I hit it pretty good (triple in the seventh).”

Clemson Starting Pitcher, Stephen Faris “I thought I pitched ok. It wasn’t my best outing, but I was out there battling. I struggled early to keep the ball up. I was trying to make a few adjustments here and there, trying to locate my pitches. Once I got that going, I got the breaking ball going. Once I did that, I got in a groove for a little while. I did make some mistakes, but overall I thought I did ok. Moskos came in and got that last out (seventh inning) to really get us going.”

North Carolina A&T Head Coach Keith Shumate “We had a goal to get Clemson to throw fastballs. We’re not big into the scouting reports but we knew that the starter had a real tough off-speed game. We tried to put as much pressure as we could in the first two innings. Our goal was to make them a little jumpy in the field and try to get them throwing the ball around. We just wanted to stay tough, but Faris pitched a great game tonight.”

“As far as running the bases, we decide before a game that we’re going to make them make plays. Clemson’s left fielder did a great job of throwing the ball to home plate. That’s the way we got here; we put pressure on people. We’ve had a bit of a layoff and when your facing a club of the caliber of Clemson, you have to make things happen. Your power hitters are going to be a little bit off. They haven’t played in four or five weeks.”

North Carolina A&T Pitcher Michael Hauff “I just ran out of gas in the seventh inning. I’d thrown too many pitches.”

North Carolina A&T Outfielder Jeremy Jones “We were just trying to make some things happen, with some hit and runs and things like that. We just try to play the game.”

On Taylor Harbin’s bloop hit “We’d been playing deep the whole game. It just fell in the right spot, fell right in there. We saw the ball.”