Hitting the Road

By Nick Parnell

Special to CollegeBaseballInsider.com

Nick Parnell is a senior lefthander at Pitt who will contribute a journal to CollegeBaseballInsider.com this season.

The first weekend of the season is always filled with emotion.

It's also filled with a decent amount of chaos if you're a Northern team. Going to school in Pittsburgh makes it virtually impossible for us to play a home game during the first month of the season. This weekend we travelled to Port Charlotte, Fla., to take on the St. Louis, Kansas State and Ohio State. The first weekend is filled with chaos because all the new guys are never quite sure what to do on the road.

For us, we flew to Tampa and immediately went to the University of Tampa for practice on Thursday and then got a lift in at a local gym. After that, we headed to Bradenton to the hotel.

When we get to the hotel on the first weekend, we find out who our roommates are going to be for the duration of the season. I was picked to room with a freshman on our team, Ryan Campbell. This wasn't much of a surprise because Ryan and I are the two submarine pitchers on the team and do virtually everything together at practice.

After we get there we have a lot of free time at the hotel throughout the weekend to spend with each other. This year we are having “Bachelor Thursdays.” We hooked up a computer to the TV in the hotel breakfast room and watched this week’s episode of The Bachelor and played cards. There was even some sparkling water on ice to make it as classy of an event as we can afford.

This week’s episode was filled with a lot of drama, which forced our Volunteer Assistant, Coach Liska, to tell us to quiet down more than once because we may have been disturbing some guests with our cheers when Ashley I and Kelsey both went home. (I apologize for ruining the surprise if you haven't seen this week’s episode yet.)

The rest of the weekend was spent mostly on the bus or on the field. We had a little bit of a disappointing weekend going 1-2, but, most importantly, we know the things that we need to work on, and we’ll be doing everything to get those fixed.

Talk to you next week when we’re in Spartanburg, S.C. Hail to Pitt!

(photo courtesy of Pitt Athletic Media Relations)