Georgia was selected as the No. 7 national seed by the NCAA Baseball Tournament selection committee and will host the Athens Regional with Georgia Tech, Army and UNC-Wilmington.
Georgia was announced a top-8 national seed and regional host on Sunday. It found out its draw, which includes rival Georgia Tech on Monday. The tournament will be played Friday-Sunday.
Georgia (39-15) will open against No. 4 seed Army (31-23). Game time will be 1 p.m. No. 3Tech (31-23) will open against UNC Wilmington (39-19). Game time will be 7 p.m. Both games will air on ESPN+.
Georgia is one of 11 teams from the SEC in the tournament, a record.
Georgia will be making is 14th regional appearance and first since 2022.
“You look at our total body of work, and I am not on the committee and not here to say that somebody shouldn’t have got it or should have got it somewhere else, but I felt pretty good about our resume,” Georgia baseball coach Wes Johnson said. “There are a lot of things you look at. We did some good stuff this year, this regular season. We beat a Clemson team here that was really good. I go all the way back to Northern Kentucky and how good they were. They won their conference tournament. They are going to give some people some fits. Georgia Tech is in our region. We took two from them. You keep going through the league, sweep Alabama, sweeping Vanderbilt, sweeping South Carolina at South Carolina, all three of those teams are in the tournament. It is kind of crazy when you hear that Tennessee and (Texas) A&M, they were talking that they are 30-something and three at home. We are one of those three losses. Those are tough places to play.”
This will be the first meeting between Georgia and Army. Georgia is 2-1 all-time against UNC Wilmington, the last meetings coming during the 2004 regular season in Athens. The Bulldogs went 2-0 against Tech this year and lead the series 220-169-2 dating to 1898. A third game in this year’s series was not completed to do inclement weather with the Bulldogs winning in the fifth inning.
Starting with Army, they can really pitch,” Johnson said. “It’s going to be a different look, not a ton of velo, but don’t get me wrong, they just don’t have a guy who is going to throw 100 is what I’m trying to say. They can really pitch; they mix their pitches well. They’ve got a couple guys, especially right there in the middle of the order, hitting over .300 with 14 or 15 homers, and they’ve got guys who can steal some bases. They’re going to do a lot of things. I don’t want to get too caught up in matchups after that, but UNC Wilmington we know is extremely offensive, always have been. They’ve got two really good starters on the mound and obviously have a couple bullpen pieces, so they’re really good. Obviously, we know Georgia Tech because we played them. I think Georgia Tech got better as the year went on and quite frankly, I’ll have to completely rewatch them on film.”
The winner of this weekend’s regional will face the winner of the Raleigh Regional which includes North Carolina State, Bryant, James Madison and South Carolina.
The winners of the regionals will play in the Super Regionals June 7-9. At stake in that best-of-three series in a spot in the College World Series, which will be played June 14-20.
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