Hiwassee Dam – For Eagles baseball head coach Tommy Strickland, the first-round state playoff game at Swain County was almost treated like a bonus game for his team.
Hiwassee Dam wasn’t expected to qualify for the playoffs at the beginning of the season, and was on the outside looking in before the final two games of the regular season against Robbinsville. But after two wins over the Black Knights, Hiwassee Dam qualified for the playoffs for the first time since 2015.
Though the Eagles fell to Swain County 11-1 in six innings, he hopes his young team will use this experience for next year and beyond. Hiwassee Dam had just one senior and two juniors this year.
“These guys are just going to get better,” Strickland said. “And having this playoff experience, and even though it was only one game, it was a different game, the feel is different. I think they’re going to take that away from it.”
After sweeping a doubleheader with Andrews on April 8 to move to one game below .500 on the season, Hiwassee Dam (7-12 overall, 5-7 Smoky Mountain Conference) lost five straight games against tougher competition; two to Murphy and Hayesville and one to Polk County, Tenn.
However, the Eagles kept their season going against Robbinsville, winning the first game of the week on May 2 in dramatic fashion. With the score tied 7-7 in the bottom of the seventh, senior Seth Hooper, who wears No. 7, was on third base.
The ball got away from the Robbinsville catcher, and Hooper dashed home and scored in his final game at Hiwassee Dam. The Eagles would win at Robbinsville 6-3 three days later, moving up to No. 29 in the state’s RPI rankings and grabbing the same seed number in the state playoffs.
“We’d string together a couple wins here, a couple wins there,” Strickland said. “They felt like they could do it again, which was the feeling they gave the whole week going into Robbinsville.”
Next year, the Eagles will only lose Hooper, who will be tough to replace after leading the team in runs batted in and being one of three main pitchers. However, with everyone else on this year’s team able to come back from a squad that won its most games in a season since the 2015 Smoky Mountain Conference champions, there’s hope that next year could be even better.
Strickland thought his team improved throughout the year, which means it should be a good place to start for 2023.
“I wanted them to get better,” he said. “I had no criteria for get better, we would just know when it happened. And I think that we did get better. They learned a lot of different things.”