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 NICK
MCCULLY - coastal carolina chanticleers
PING!BASEBALL SPOTLIGHT PLAYER
The Coastal Carolina Chanticleers are hoping
for a big season. More than that, they are expecting it. After
a successful 2008 season, which ended in a Super Regional
loss to North Carolina, the Big South powerhouse looks to
take the next step and spend some time in Omaha playing a
little hardball. In order to do that, the Chants will need
another superb season from their unlikely ace on the mound,
Nick McCully.
 A
junior out of Lakeland, Florida, McCully stands at an unassuming
5’11”, but when he is on the mound he can be the
most imposing player on the field. After making the 2007 All-Ping!
Freshman team after going 7-3 with a 3.48 ERA, McCully had
an impressive sophomore campaign in which he was 10-3 with
a 3.63 ERA in 24 appearances and held his opponents to a .245
batting average. Not too shabby for someone who didn’t
pick up a glove until late in his formative years.
An unlikely source first persuaded McCully
to take up baseball, “My mom got me into it,”
he admits, “Then I just really kinda fell in love with
it. It became the main thing in my life.”
Nick quickly found out that mom knows best
and that he was good at the game. Yet modest in his ability,
McCully wasn’t extremely optimistic about being a top
player when he first started tossing the horsehide, “I
was thinking about trying to find a junior college when I
became a freshman in high school.” He ended up making
the Junior Olympics Trial Team his sophomore year in high
school and quickly realized he had a shot at playing competitively
at a DI university.
After attending a showcase in Conway, McCully
was jazzed to attend Coastal and passed on offers from South
Florida and New Orleans. “After I came here, I decided
there was nowhere else I wanted to go.” However there
was one thing that McCully wasn’t certain of about going
to Coastal Carolina. What on earth was a Chanticleer? “I
had no idea,” McCully confesses. Despite his unfamiliarly
the school’s mascot (lets just say it’s a proud
and fierce rooster), one thing was certain - mom liked the
team colors. Since mom was on the ball about him picking up
the game in the first place, the bags were packed for Carolina.
Besides, isn’t school colors as good a deciding factor
as any in choosing a team? If you look good, you feel good.
If you feel good, you play good (exhibit A: the Houston Astros
never made it to the Series until they junked the thick stripes).
In preparing for the 2009 season, McCully
has been polishing his on the mound repertoire which is now
four effective pitches deep. He has a fastball, a slider,
a change up, and a new pitch, “I got a cutter I’m
working on.” His off-season regimen included sleeping
in late (nice!), weight training, running and conditioning,
and long tossing. His lifting weights include focusing on
his legs, including the ever-popular squats.
Over the past summer McCully pitched in the
Cape Cod League for the Bourne Braves. “The Cape was
awesome,” McCully reminisced, “Every hitter you
are facing is a three or four hole hitter on their team back
at school. You have to pitch a lot more. You don’t get
lucky as often. You got to think pitches and earn your way
through the game.”
McCully was pretty wicked awesome himself
during his time in New England and his game flourished. He
won the B.F.C. Whitehouse Award as the Cape league’s
most outstanding pitcher after posting a perfect 5-0 record
(ranking second in the league in wins) with a 1.98 ERA (finishing
seventh overall). He allowed just 30 hits in 50 innings on
the hill, striking out 44 while issuing only 14 walks. Those
numbers would be impressive if he was pitching against little
leaguers, let alone the top college batsmen in the nation.
McCully looks forward to the Chants having
a big year, a REALLY big year. “I don’t think
that if we went anything less than Omaha (and the CWS) we
would really be happy now that we took that next step to the
Super Regional.” he said.
One spur in McCully’s personal saddle
in posting another top notch season will be that he is throwing
to a new catcher this year. Nonetheless, McCully has confidence.
“Evan Noell, he’s actually my roommate now, we
have a real close tie,” he states. “We really
are on the same wavelength.”
Another potential roadblock? A possible rematch
with regional rival North Carolina. While acknowledging UNC’s
strength, McCully does not secede the Carolina crown just
yet. “I think we can play our game and we can beat them
like we did last year in the regular season,” he remarked.
“Definitely a great team, though,” McCully said
as he looks forward to dueling with the Tar Heels on February
24th.
Unquestionably McCully isn’t the only
one who was unfamiliar with what a Chanticleer is. Unless
you’re in the Conway area, a big college athletics fan
or Chaucer aficionado (check out the Nun's Priest Tale in
the Canterbury Tales, a good read) a Chant is an unfamiliar
term. However if McCully and the rest of the boys in the unmistakable
teal, bronze & black have anything to do with it, you’ll
be hearing about them often. It will be hard to not know what
a Chanticleer is you see them playing nightly on ESPN during
the College World Series.
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