Trojans Have Easy Day in Everglades City

It didn’t take long for Lely’s new head coach, Kit Fowler, to see that he had a colossal mismatch on his hands Thursday evening in Everglades City. Fowler started substituting liberally in the top of the first inning. But no amount of substituting could balance the scales as the Trojans raced to an easy 27-3 win.

“I was telling Becky, I didn’t schedule this game, the last coach did,” Fowler said. "I don’t know why they did. She told me it was supposed to be a JV game, not a varsity game.” Lely doesn’t have a JV team.

Fowler was happy to get his young guys some live action.

“It’s good for them,” Fowler said, “because those guys aren’t going to get the chance to play against a Naples varsity team. I have a couple of guys who are freshmen who got to see some live pitches in a game.”

Fowler said he is trying to get his team to believe in themselves.

“I tell them they can beat anybody in the county,” Fowler said, “the issue is they need to believe in themselves that they can beat them. We played Immokalee on Tuesday (a 13-3 win). The first inning we played terrible baseball. I told them to play your game, play the game you usually play. Well, the next six innings we played completely clean baseball. No errors. They’re crushing the ball. Making smart base running decisions. We end up run-ruling them.”

“Then we played an add-on game with Naples (a 19-1 loss),” Fowler continued. “The first inning and a half Naples was shocked. We had the bases loaded in the first inning and ended up not scoring. Then in the bottom of the first we made an error and gave up two runs. The next inning we loaded the bases again. Then the floodgates opened and we made a bunch of errors.”

"A lot of these kids don’t realize they can go on and play at a University of Miami or a University of Florida. They can absolutely do that. They 100 percent can do that, it’s no problem,” he said.

Lely traveled to Labelle Tuesday before returning home to host Golden Gate on Thursday at 7:00 PM.