CCU gets bid to NCAA tournament, heads to Greenville Regional Friday

HORRY COUNTY, S.C. (WMBF) - The Coastal Carolina baseball team met up at Handleys today to watch the NCAA baseball selection show and learn their fate in the postseason.

The Chants are headed to the Greenville Regional as the No. 3 seed to face No. 2 seed Virginia Friday at 6 p.m. on ESPN+.

Coastal went 21-8-1 in Sun Belt conference play, but fell in the first game of the Sun Belt Conference Championship to Troy,

“All you had to do was look at who got left out to realize we’re very blessed to have gotten an opportunity,” said Head Coach Gary Gilmore. “We had a great year in a lot of ways. It started out a little slow, we had some injuries. Different things going on. The kids fought through it. Our schedule paid off for us. We had the second most difficult out-of-conference schedule in the country.”

The Louisiana Rajin’ Cajuns won the Sun Belt Championship this year to get an automatic big into the tournament. Georgia Southern, Texas State and Coastal Carolina all received bids Monday.

Four Sun Belt teams made it into the NCAA tournament this year.

The Sun Belt is 1-of-5 conferences with at least 4 teams heading to the tournament, joining the SEC, ACC, Big 12 and Pac-12.

“It’s by far the best the league has been top to bottom since we’ve been in it,” said Gilmore. “I mean there were always a couple good teams. You know and it’s kind of scary that you get southern miss in it next year and Old Dominion on top of that. It’s going to be a league ya know with three of four teams every year. If everyone plays well, it’s going to be a dog fight to be in that top-four seed. Going into that conference tournament moving forward.”

This is the 18th time coastal will play in a NCAA Regional. They won the College World Series in 2016.

“If we go in and somehow find a way to win you’ll see a gear, you’ve never seen out of these guys. It’s a confidence thing and you know that’s what made our season start going. We started winning some weekend series, and winning 3-games and winning the mid-week game and all of a sudden we started believing we could be good. I keep preaching to them, there’s a gear we have yet to get to. We have not hit overdrive with this group, but I’m hoping sometime this weekend we can find overdrive.”

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