Tom Walter breaks down what he wants Wake Forest to focus on during weather delays

Wake Forest spent hours trailing Stanford in their College World Series game the other day. It wasn’t until the bottom of the eighth inning after several hours of play and another few from a weather delay that the Demon Deacons took their first lead of the day, 3-2, before retiring the Cardinal side in the ninth to seal the deal and win the ballgame.

Afterwards, the question for Wake Forest coach Tom Walter was: how did he keep the guys locked in during the break? His answer:

“We spent the first five minutes just talking about some situational things and what we needed to do when we came out of the delay. And then at the end of that, we just talked about winning the delay; let’s win the delay. Let’s have better energy than them coming out of this. And whatever you need to do to cool down, relax, hydrate, because again we didn’t know if it was going to be 30 minutes or two hours. So it’s just kind of one of those things that we’re on notice and just catch your breath and let’s get back to work.”

The Deacons certainly came out with the better energy and rode that to the finish. They also got some help from their typically dominant pitching unit. It sure is nice to have so many elite options on the mound if you’re Walter.

“When it went to that second delay. So if it had just gone the first 30 minutes, we would have gone back to Sully and Sully was ready to go. But once it got beyond that, we just didn’t feel good about Sully there,” Walter explained about the decision. “We looked at the matchup sheet. We considered Roland. He was a good matchup for the hitters they had coming up. I considered Massey. He was not quite as good a matchup.”

That’s when Seth Keener’s name was brought up.

“Will Craig was the first to mention, he was like: ‘What about Keener?’ The more we looked at who was coming up in the matchups, the more Keener really made sense. Again, if he’s going to start on Wednesday for us, or whenever we play after this one, it’s good to get him out there, let him get his feet wet before his start.”

The Wake pitching staff, as it has all year, was again able to complete the job and keep Stanford from extending the ballgame in the top of then ninth. Heck of a job by the Demon Deacons for staying composed and ready through the weather break to pickup the win.