On the night of Friday, September 19, the Greenville University Baseball Team took on their Annual Team Ironman out at Robert E. Smith Field.
The Greenville Baseball Team was split into five separate groups, which were all led by this year’s seniors. The seniors, having experienced this event for the last three years, had to strategize and use the athletes that they drafted off the baseball team effectively. This event has always been a staple for the program when it comes to team bonding and chemistry. “Having competition like this really helps us to get to know each other and see how the team is going to compete when they face some adversity,” said senior outfielder Austin Lawrence. That is exactly what the Greenville University Baseball athletes encountered with the Ironman. The events were very strenuous and required teamwork from everyone in order to achieve victory. This year it looked a little different by having an individual section and a team section. The individual events included med ball throws, weighted planks, weighted wall sits, sled pushes, pull-up bar hangs, bear crawls, and races around the field. Then, following all those individual events, there were the team events. The team events this year included tire flips, tug of war, plate carries, person-pole carry, and the “Around the World”.
The “Around the World” event is one of the toughest parts of the Ironman. This event required each of the five teams to do 25 push-ups, crunches, burpees, squats, and lunges around Robert E. Smith field. However, once each team finished those exercises around the field, each team member had to scale the new plyo wall that was added to the field last year. Scaling the wall put the teams in a position where they really had to strategize because it was no small task. “Getting over the plyo wall is something that could win and lose the event for any team. The faster you can get over that wall and keep moving to the finish line, the better off you are,” said senior first basemen Parker Panich. Since this was a timed event, each team raced against the clock in order to get the best time.
The winning team for this year’s Ironman was led by senior Lawrence. Happy with his team’s victory, Lawrence said,” I think my guys went out and competed very well throughout the entire thing. My guys seemed to come together, and that seemed to be enough to lead to a victory in the end.” Overall, this held true for the other teams competing in the Ironman, too. Both senior catcher Mark Islas and senior outfielder Josh Heller were very pleased with how their teams performed. Islas’s team finished second in this year’s Ironman, and he said, “I think that this year was probably the most competitive year we have had with the ironman. The teams were stacked pretty equally and didn’t give each other an inch in competition. The scores being so close together shows that we are a team that is going to work hard and that we aren’t afraid to battle it out come season time.” The same feeling held true for Heller as well when he said, ”The team really did a good job of encouraging each other throughout the entire event. Guys picked each other up and showed that at the end of the day, we are all on the same team pushing to make each other the best that we can be.”
Media By Dustin Phelps.
