Jefferson Davis baseball team 8-8 with 9-man -- sometimes 10 -- roster
Raiders looking to make a push in SCISA Class A state playoffs
Blackville – The game of baseball was made to be played with nine players, and that’s exactly what Jefferson Davis Academy is having to do, at least most of the time.
“We say all the time that nine is all you need to play,” said Raiders head coach Mannie Wright.
And the Jefferson Davis Nine was doing a pretty good job. The Raiders are 8-8 a week out of spring break and that was against a schedule in which it had faced a fellow SCISA Class A team just twice. JDA split two games with Holly Hill Academy winning 17-4 before falling 14-7 before returning from spring break and splitting with Wardlaw Academy. The Raiders won the first game 8-3 before dropping the second 8-6.
“I feel great about where we’re at,” Wright said. “I think we’re still primed to make a great run deep into the playoffs and make a run at a state championship.”
A newcomer to the team is the leading hitter in junior catcher Harrison Ray. He owne a .432 batting average, 16 runs batted and 15 runs scored, all team highs. He had five doubles and two triples.
Junior first baseman/third baseman Reece Still was batting .343 with seven RBI and 13 runs, while junior shortstop Corbin Perry was hitting .306 with a team high six doubles.
Senior Landon Williams plays shortstop and third, senior Tanner Page splits time between second base and left field, junior Bryson Livingston plays left, sophomore Jake Harrington right and senior Dalton Nix center. Like Still, freshman Carson Sumner is a corner infielder.
On occasion, the JDA 9 does have an “and one” in seventh-grader Deklin Grubbs. He’d played three games when called up from the junior varsity and was batting .286. Wright is very high on him.
Ray is batting leadoff with Page in the 2 hole and Perry hitting third. Still is the cleanup hitter followed by Sumner, Williams
Harrington, Livingston and Nix.
As far as pitching goes, Perry has been the workhorse with 27 2/3 innings pitched in six games, five of them starts. He had 29 strikeouts and a 3.04 earned run average.
Still had worked 17 1/3 innings with a 5.65 ERA. Nix had worked 10 innings and Ray nine.
Wright said the Raiders need to continue to hone their game as the playoffs near.
“We have to play our brand of baseball,” he said “We can beat anybody when we play our game. We’ve got seven losses and in five of them it was something we could control.”
JDA SOFTBALL OPENS 3-8
The Jefferson Davis softball team has struggled this season with a 3-8 record. However, when you’ve graduated eight seniors over the past two seasons and are a Class A school, that might be expected.
“The season has been full of ups and downs,” said veteran head coach Bart Owens, who led the Raiders to a state title in 2024. “We really struggled pitching and scoring runs, but the last few games have been better.
“We have had to replace five seniors from last year and three the previous year, so we are struggling but we’re getting better. Hopefully we will be playing our best at the end of April and first of May (for the state tournament).”
JDA was hitting .243 as a team, but had three batters hitting over .300. Harper Still had the highest batting average at .381 with three doubles, six runs and five RBI, while Abby Deering had a .333 batting average and seven RBI. Esme Montejano was batting .318 and shared the team lead in runs scored at seven with Rynn Fickling and Kinlee Ray.
Fickling was only batting .200 but had a double and two triples. Ray was batting .238 but had a team high eight RBI.
Deering has been the most effective pitcher. In 10 innings, she had a 3.50 ERA. Fickling had pitched the most innings at 20 1/3, while Avari Yongue had worked 8 2/3 innings.
