Nick Mingione compares Game 1 of Super Regional to an SEC weekend

Kentucky welcomes Oregon State to Lexington for a best-of-three Super Regional series with a spot in the Men’s College World Series on the line.

Wildcats head coach Nick Mingione is of the mindset that two wins are all he needs out of his group this weekend — something the Kentucky baseball team did on a near-weekly basis during the regular season.

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“That’s obviously something that every team in the supers want to do to where you just feel like alright, I know we’ve got two games to win one, as opposed to I’ve got to win the next two,” Mingione explained. “So it’s absolutely important and in a lot of ways, it’s much like an SEC weekend to where you’re trying to win every single weekend. It doesn’t matter if you win the first one, and then you win the next two, or if you win the first one, lose the middle one and win the next one.

“Ultimately, at the end of the day, you’ve got to win the series, however that goes.”

Out of Kentucky’s 10 SEC series this season, they swept four of them (four of their first five) and went 8-2 in those three-game matchups.

Twice saw UK win the first game, lose the second, and win the series in the third. Once they won the first two games before losing the third despite having already wrapped up the series win. On one occasion, however, the Wildcats were able to win the first game of a series before unceremoniously losing the next two — a nightmare scenario in the Super Regionals. That series was against the NCAA Tournament’s No. 1 seed, the Tennessee Volunteers, and a repeat of that April series isn’t expected to occur in Lexington this weekend. At least on paper.

“When you look at our team this year, we’ve done it both ways,” Mingione continued. “So to be able to draw from that success, you know, in those experiences whether we don’t win the first game and now we got to win the next two, we’ve been there done that. Or we win the first one, we lose the second one, then you’ve got to win the third one.

“So the piece I have as a coach is that we’ve been through both sides of that — and against really good teams. We’ve won either way against really good teams, so our team will be able to draw from that experience.”

The first pitch for Saturday’s opening game of the best two out of three series is scheduled for a late 9 p.m. ET start time. The game will air live on ESPNU and the ESPN app.