Tigers heading to Atlanta Regional
AUBURN | Auburn is in and will be playing at a familiar site.
The Tigers were chosen as a No. 2 seed in the Atlanta Regional where they’ll be matched up against No. 3 seed Coastal Carolina in game one at 11 a.m. CT Friday morning. No. 1 seed Georgia Tech will play No. 4 seed Florida A&M that evening.
Auburn has never played Coastal Carolina and has a 4-0 all-time record against Florida A&M with the last meeting coming in 2017. The Tigers and Yellow Jackets have a long-time rivalry with AU holding a 119-111-6 series edge, but Ga. Tech swept AU this season winning 9-3 at Auburn and 11-6 at home.
“You know, just to see our name called, that’s a huge opportunity,” said junior shortstop Will Holland, a Lawrenceville, Ga., native. “Especially to go to Atlanta, you know, being from Georgia, you love to go back to your hometown. I think we can be like a home team in that regional. We have a lot of Auburn fans in Georgia and it’s a short two-hour drive, so we know we’re going to get a lot of people.
“We’re really looking forward to it — and I think we owe Georgia Tech a little something."
Auburn comes into the Regional 33-25 overall. The Tigers won a key game in the regular season finale at LSU to get an important 14th conference win and opened up the SEC Tournament with a win over Tennessee before dropping the next two.
Auburn will enter the tournament with a No. 19 NCAA RPI and a 15-19 record against the 64-team field.
“This is a new start,” Auburn coach Butch Thompson said. “Even if we had won the league, even if any of our six great SEC teams this year that are hosting a regional, they got to go play. I see the other teams in their field, so it really doesn’t matter what you’ve done now if you get the opportunity, and that’s the way we got to look at it. Can we get fresh? We’re getting three lifts in, we’re doing everything we can to spend time away from the field together to keep trying to build a team with 18 new players.
“There’s no quit. There’s no, ‘Hey, we’ll get ‘em next year.’ We’re still trying to build this team and see if something neat can come together because, you know, we had a 15-game win streak this year, but it’s been a couple of months since we felt like we’ve played our best baseball. That’s still out there for us because we have this opportunity to go to Atlanta.”
Auburn’s third consecutive Regional bid in Thompson’s fourth season is the most since going to seven straight from 1997-2003. The Tigers finished second at the Tallahassee Regional in 2017 and won the Raleigh Regional last season, scoring 40 runs in three games, and advancing to a Super Regional for the second time in school history.
Auburn has never won a Regional in back-to-back years and hasn’t advanced to the College World Series since winning the Tallahassee Regional in 1997.
The Tigers played in the Atlanta Regional in 2000, finishing third behind Georgia Tech and Stetson.