The baseball team rebounded after its tough loss on Friday, March 2 to Eastern Illinois to beat the Panthers on Saturday, March 2, 14-7 on a cold day at Plainsman Park.
"Those are tough elements to play in," said Head Coach John Pawlowski. "You look at the errors and the walks and our guys did a good job. Tough elements, but proud of them."
Auburn started the game strong, taking the early 2-1 lead in the first inning.
They again rallied in the 3rd inning after Cullen Wacker got a triple off a hit to deep center field, sending in two runs to give Auburn the two-run lead.
Wacker finished the day going 4-5 with 4 RBIs.
"I had a good bp (batting practice) before the game and came out and was able to execute swings on good pitches and handle pitches in the zone," Wacker said.
Garret Cooper followed up with an RBI double down the left-field line to extend the lead to 4-1. The Tigers would end the inning leading 5-1.
They would continue their success in the fourth inning after scoring three runs on four hits and a Jackson Burgreen homerun to extend their lead to 8-1.
But just like on Friday, Eastern Illinois would respond in the fifth inning with three runs on two hits to cut Auburn's lead to 8-4.
In the sixth inning Auburn would replace starting pitcher Michael O'Neal with Justin Camp. O'Neal gave up four runs on three hits, three walks and no strikeouts through five innings and 73 pitches.
Camp would not do much better than O'Neal after giving up three runs on four hits and one strikeout in a little more than an inning.
In the middle of the top of the seventh inning after Eastern Illinois had cut the lead to 8-6, Auburn brought in Conner Kendrick.
"We wouldn't want to have anybody else out there than Conner to close the door for us," Wacker said. "We have faith in him when he's out there. All the credit goes to him being able to shut the door for us."
Auburn would go on to score six runs in the eighth inning and Kendricks would finish the day with one hit and no runs given up with four strikeouts to push Auburn to the final score of 14-7.
"I felt good today, so I felt like I could finish it off," Kendricks said. "After yesterday's game we were a little down, so it put the ball back in our court with the win and get some motivation behind that."
The Tigers were able to get back to their winning ways after losing two games earlier in the week and upgrade their record to 7-3 on the year.
"It's very important for us," said Pawlowski. "The mindset of this team is we need to find ways to score and put teams away. They jumped back into it, but Conner Kendrick did a great job for us."
Auburn will go for the series victory against Eastern Illinois Sunday, March 3 at 1 p.m.
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