By RAY BENTON
Leader sports editor
The Zone 3 Junior American Legion tournament is set to begin at 5 p.m. tomorrow at Burns Park in North Little Rock, with a little twist.
An added wrinkle to this year’s postseason play is the sudden addition of Pine Bluff to the Zone 3 tournament, even though they didn’t play Zone 3 games in the regular season. The team, which actually consists primarily of players from White Hall, has only played seven games, but they are 7-0 and were awarded the top seed and a first-round bye in the tournament.
“They (state American Legion officials) told us that we could play with our five teams and get one spot in the state tournament, or add Pine Bluff to our zone tournament and get two bid,” Sylvan Hills coach Chris Foor explained. “We figured, even if Pine Bluff runs the table, we’re still all playing for the same thing.”
The zone that Pine Bluff plays in consists of nearly two times the number of teams in Zone 3, so the decision was made by state officials to move Pine Bluff into the central zone. No explanation could be gathered concerning why the team played so few games against the other teams in its own zone during the regular season. The Pine Bluff team played a large part of its schedule in Zone 3 at the season-opening tournament at Burns Park, where they won four games and the tourney title.
Cabot went 5-2 against zone competition and got the second seed and the other first-round bye.
Sylvan Hills will open the tournament as the four seed, and will face Rose Bud at 5 p.m. Sunday. That game will be followed by third-seeded North Little Rock facing Jacksonville.
Sylvan Hills and North Little Rock finished the season with identical 4-3-1 records, and a strange ending to a game earlier in the season helped lead to the Colts getting the nod for the higher seed.
NLR beat Sylvan Hills at Burns Park, and the two teams tied at Sylvan Hills due to a somewhat controversial time-limit stoppage to the tied game.
Had the game been allowed to continue and Sylvan Hills won, it not only would have had the higher third seed, but would’ve been tied with Cabot for second place and may have been awarded the bye.
Foor believes his team, which won the Gwatney Chevrolet Memorial Day Classic, has a great chance to make some noise in the event and advance to state.
“Our hitting and pitching has improved immensely since we started,” Foor said. “Our offense has really come around and our pitching has been really steady, especially from our second-tier guys. They have really improved. Guys like Kyle Roberts, Marcus Long and Connor Poteet, I’ve been able to bring them in for relief in some of our big games and we’ve not seen any drop off. I’d say those boys are not far off from what I’d call the top of our rotation.”
With good hitting and good pitching, Foor says the key to a successful zone tournament for Sylvan Hills is smart play.
“We came into the season as a very young team,” Foor said. “When you have that there’s going to be bumps in the road. If we can eliminate mental mistakes, we’ll be a force to be reckoned with in this tournament.”
Jacksonville enters the event as the bottom seed, but coach Bob Hickingbotham feels good about how his team has played late in the season.
“We haven’t played since Monday so we’re going to have a chance to get everybody ready to pitch,” Hickingbotham said.
The game on Monday was a big win against North Little Rock, Jacksonville’s first-round opponent, and it was one of the team’s better games.
“We have some momentum going in,” Hickingbotham said. “We swung the bats finally against North Little Rock. We had that one big inning and we hadn’t been able to do that most of the year. We’re going to have to do it again. We’re going to have to hit good pitching because they have two good ones and I’m sure one of them will be on the mound against us.”
The addition of two players late in the season has helped Jacksonville as well.
Arvie Crudup, who played first base for Magnolia’s class 5A state championship team, joined the team when he came to Jacksonville for summer visitation with his father, Arvie Sr. who is a Babe Ruth coach for the Jacksonville Youth Baseball Association.
Gwatney also got help from Eric Moore, a pitcher for Abundant Life in high school who spent much of the baseball season playing summer hoops.
“Those two are going to help,” Hickingbotham said. “They’re both pretty good players and we needed some depth. We just don’t have very many this year.”
Sunday’s first-round winners will play again Monday afternoon. Sylvan Hills-Rose Bud winner will get Cabot at noon Monday, while the Jacksonville-NLR winner plays Pine Bluff at 2:30 p.m.
