Office of Sports Information note: This is third installment of a series of NJCU baseball blogs by freshman first baseman/outfielder
JOE STEINBERGER (
San Diego, CA/San Diego). The West Coast-native is also a sports writer for
“The Gothic Times” student newspaper.
PART 1: Allow Me to Introduce Myself
PART 2: One Outta Two Ain't Bad
The Florida trip was a lot of fun. I've been on a lot of baseball trips in my life. I've been to Hawaii, Ohio, New York and Arizona, but none of those trips compared to this year's Florida trip. It was great being in the sun, hanging out at the pool, and not wearing winter clothing in March. The trip got off to an awesome start with our victory over Gwynedd-Mercy College where Steve Montalbano pitched a complete game and TOM BURKE fired a perfect strike to home plate in the ninth inning to gun down the possible tying run. At the time that was the most exciting game I had ever played, but that all changed when we overcame a 7-run deficit to Curry College and pulled out an improbable 11-10 victory. Wow, those games were awesome. You can't beat baseball in the spring.
As for the trip down there, that was interesting. First of all, we had to meet at the NJCU locker room at 3:30 a.m., we had to catch a 7 a.m. flight to Orlando, drive for nearly an hour to the resort, change into our uniforms and then drive to the field to play our first game. That single day seemed like it lasted one whole week. But looking back, it was one of the best baseball days of my life.
Even though we dropped the last two games of our trip, I think that this team has a never-give-up attitude that will help us come back in some more games later on in the season. I've been on a lot of teams that would give up when the going got tough, but this team kept playing hard until each game ended no matter what the score was.
