After securing No. 1 seed, Georgia Tech baseball opens ACC tournament Thursday

Tech was picked to finish 10th in the ACC standings in the league’s preseason poll. Instead, it weathered a seven-game losing streak in April and edged out five other teams that won at least 17 ACC games to claim the program’s first outright ACC title since 2005.

“We got a really talented team. We knew that all along. We also knew that we were young,” Tech center fielder Drew Burress said. “That’s one of those things where sometimes you lose games and you almost wanna use it as an excuse: ‘Oh, yeah, we’re young, we’re learning.’ But at this point in the year, I really think probably the last 15-20 games, we kind of decided that’s not an excuse anymore.

“We’re talented. We’re better than these teams are so we’re planning on beating them and being young has nothing to do with it. These last few games, where we’ve kind of come out of the rough stretch that we had, we’ve really used that to our advantage.”

Burress and Lodise are both semifinalists for the Golden Spikes Award given annually to the nation’s top player. They lead a lineup that includes outfielder Alex Hernandez, the ACC freshman of the year, all-ACC catcher Vahn Lackey and infielder Kent Schmidt (who likely would have been all-conference if an injury hadn’t forced him to miss 20 games).

Tech’s rotation rounded into form nicely over the past four months as well, with Brady Jones and Tate McKee making 14 starts each. Mason Patel has won 11 games as a long reliever and Jaylen Paden, having moved into the series-finale starter role, has a team-leading 1.71 ERA.

Those players are a big reason the Jackets are on the cusp of winning 40 games in a season for the first time since 2019.

“These guys set their goals at the beginning of the year. They wrote ‘em in the bathroom, which is very unique. I’ve never seen that in 32 years,” Tech coach Danny Hall said. “That was their expectation going into this season. We’ve checked the box on one of those goals. The second part of it now is to win the tournament.”

On Thursday afternoon at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, Tech will face a dangerous-hot California team. Cal, which finished last in the ACC, beat Louisville 12-2 in eight innings Tuesday and eliminated Wake Forest in a 14-12 win Wednesday.

Tech swept the Golden Bears (24-30) in April in Atlanta.

Should the Jackets survive Thursday’s affair, they will have a day off before playing at 1 p.m. Saturday against Virginia Tech, Clemson or North Carolina State. Sunday’s championship game is scheduled for noon and will be broadcast live on ESPN2.

“It’s the fun part of the year because things kind of get heightened a little bit, the importance of the game get heightened, but the game is still the same,” Hall said. “You just gotta go play it, try to score more runs than the other team and come out on top.”