Coming into this season, there was a level of optimism around the University of Charleston baseball team that one might not normally expect from a team that had just won 16 games the year before.
But coach Andrew Wright had a feeling that his group had something special. A program-record 30 wins later and the Golden Eagles head into this week's Mountain East Conference tournament ready to make a run at making some more history.
"This team has bought in from the very beginning," Wright said. "At times it hasn't been easy, and when we came in here a couple of years ago, it was a situation that needed a bit of a culture change. But we couldn't do what we're doing unless all 48 of these guys were on board."
Charleston (30-20) will kick the tournament off at Beckley's Linda K. Epling Stadium at 11 a.m. Thursday as the South division's No. 3 seed, taking on North division champion Shepherd (28-21). The regular-season meetings between the two schools ended in 5-1 and 12-4 victories for Shepherd.
UC wants to use those games and some of the lessons learned over the course of the long season to serve as a springboard into a successful postseason appearance.
Wright believes his team is a different group from the one that last faced the Rams in the early portion of conference play. It's now a team that has been through the rigors of a full season together, one that has found its way through managing all of the ups and downs that baseball has to offer.
Because of that, this team knows it still can find success.
"Early in the year we got a little bit ahead of ourselves. There for a while, we hit a lull where we were still trying to find out who we were," Wright said. "Some of our younger guys have grown up a little bit and have gotten to the point where we are now where you look at us going from last year to now with a chance to win the division in the final weekend of the regular season.
"That says a lot about this team."
Heading into the conference tournament, Charleston has four players hitting better than .330 for the season - Lee Carneal, who is hitting .371 with 13 doubles and five home runs, and Austin Hathaway, who has hits in nine of the last 10 games and is hitting .432 over that stretch.
The pitching staff has been carried as of late by a handful of strong performances from its starters. Adam Jafine is 7-4 with a 3.71 ERA and is coming off a shutout in his last start on Sunday against West Virginia State. Charleston leads the MEC with a 4.58 ERA as a staff.
During their late-season run, the Golden Eagles have allowed more than five runs just twice in their final 10 regular-season games, while averaging six runs per game. UC finished the season winning seven of those last 10 after a stretch where it lost three of four.
Entering the MEC tournament, Wright believes the Golden Eagles have started to trend in the right direction at the perfect moment.
"That stuff makes you refocus. It puts you in a situation where you need to play your best baseball and right now, at the end of the year, we feel like we've been doing that," Wright said. "The big task now is to just keep it going."
Other first-round games Thursday in the double-elimination six-team tournament are South Division champion Concord (26-23) vs. North division No. 3 seed Fairmont State (28-22) at 3 p.m. and West Liberty (28-19) vs. West Virginia Wesleyan (21-28) in a battle of No. 2 divisional seeds.
The championship round is scheduled for Sunday.
Contact Michael Carvelli at 304-348-4810 or michael.carvelli@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @carvelli3.