As great of a game as last night's battle with Tyler Junior College was, today's battle with the #7 ranked Niagara County Community College Thunder Wolves was the polar opposite.  Walks, errors, and miscues were the rule not the exception as the Cougars offensive prowess and defensive ability seemed to dry up in the eastern Tennessee sunshine.

The Cougars would use five pitchers on the day with Jacob Bryant getting the start.  Those pitchers combined to allow 8 walks with no strikeouts and 13 hits; while their defensive committed three errors and had several unrecorded mistakes to produce 14 Thunder Wolve runs.

Offensively the Cougars were just as poor failing to record a single hit, until pinch hitter Kaiden Beaty flared a ball to short center field in the top of the 5th inning.  After a controversial runner interference call, Ruben Sepulveda was hit by a pitch to plate the Cougars second run of the game.  Eric Martinez's fifth RBI of the series came on a sacrifice fly that scored Ryan Davenport.    Kane Mendieta doubled down the left field line to give him his seventh RBI for the series.  With game continuing run 90 feet away, the Cougars would go down on a foul tip, third strike; falling 14-4, ending their season with a 28-30 record.

There is an old adage that you have to learn how to win with each step you take in competition.  The Cougars won the Region XIV Championship in 2019, and hosted the South District West Divisional in which they were upset.  2021 brought their first opportunity to defend that title and though they didn't, they learned how to capture the Divisional Championship and followed that up with the South District Championship that punched their ticket to this World Series.  Perhaps, 2022 will see the Cougars put all the pieces together and claim a hunk of hardware at the College World Series.

2021 will end as the "best ever" season in program history, though it did not conclude the way anyone would have preferred.