The Catholic High School baseball team went 0-for-3 against Acadiana High School in a weekend series on Friday and Saturday.

CHS head coach David Jordan said that despite the results over the weekend, he is excited to see the improvement on the team.

“We’re starting to put some pieces of the puzzle together,” he explained. “We didn’t know who our shortstop was going to be going into the year and we got a surprise from our freshmen. Our catcher, Trey (Delahoussaye), did a good job. He caught 21 innings in two days, so there were a lot of guys who worked hard today.

“I think, defensively, when we get settled, we’ll be much better than we showed. We have to throw more strikes. We walked way too many people, and those are free passes. It becomes a mental game as a pitcher when your defense isn’t making the routine play. You start trying to pitch too fine, you start trying to pitch to strike people out, and you can’t do that. Regardless of how bad our defense is from time to time, you still want to pitch to contact, and I think sometimes our pitchers try to throw too fine and end up walking people and we can’t defend it.”

Jordan said that in the final game of the series, he turned to his younger players to step up and put in strong performances.

“In this last game, we threw two freshmen,” he said. “At one time, we had a sophomore at first, a sophomore at second, a freshman at shortstop. We showed spurts of hitting the ball well, we showed spurs of pitching well. Right now there’s just no consistency. When one wheel falls off, we have a tendency to let the other wheels fall off and we crash.

“I thought the Napier kid (Zachary) who started game two today was really throwing well. He gets two outs and then we have two errors at third base, and that was the kid’s first start at third base but it’s early in the season and I’m trying to give kids opportunities. It’s a chance to succeed, but it’s also a chance where if you fail, you might not see it again. We’ve got to find a legitimate third baseman, because he is our third baseman but when he pitches, I need someone who can come in and get it done.”

Jones spoke about how his team needs to approach the game mentally.

“In this game, I like to talk about that ladder,” he said. “You don’t want to go up and down that motivational ladder, you want to stay even keel, through the good times and the bad. We seem to struggle with that. I think we tend to get way too high for the highs and way too low for the lows. We have to find that middle ground. We’ve still got 27 more varsity games, so they just have to stay right in the middle.”

Jones said that he has high hopes for his team this year.

“I think that we’re going to be okay, I really do,” he said. “I’ve coached a lot of baseball teams, and I like this team. They work hard, they practice hard. We know our faults and we’re going to continue to work on them. Obviously, like every team, you’re going to have some disgruntled kids because they aren’t playing that much, but it’s all part of it. We’ll deal with that as it comes.”

Acadiana High 8, Catholic High 3

The Panthers found success early Friday, scoring two runs in the first inning but Acadiana returned fire with a five-run inning in the second and two more runs in the third to pull away from Catholic High.

The Panthers were able to freeze out the Rams for the remainder of the game, but were only able to add one more run themselves, a home run by Jack Chauvin in the 4th inning.

Catholic High finished the game with three runs from 19 chances at bat, three hits, two RBIs, and five strikeouts.

Acadiana High 8, Catholic High 5

The Panthers began their second game of the series with a strong defensive performance Saturday morning, holding Acadiana scoreless in the first three innings. But Catholic High was unable to score until the sixth inning, by which time Acadiana had already built a two-run lead.

A double from William Minvielle and a single from John David Hidalgo brought in two runs each, tying the game and forcing an eighth inning.

The Panthers finished the second game with five runs from 36 chances at bat, 13 hits, five RBIs, and seven strikeouts.

Acadiana High 12, Catholic High 2

In the final game of the series, the Panthers struggled to get on base once again. Catholic High finished the game with six errors despite strong performances by two freshmen pitchers.

Catholic High’s only runs were both scored in the fifth inning, thanks to a single by Trey Delahoussaye and another single by Noah Broussard.

The Panthers finished the game with 8 hits from 24 chances at bat, two RBIs, and three strikeouts.