Southern Miss dogpile dreaming ahead of Auburn Regional

When Southern Miss went into dogpile mode following last year’s Hattiesburg Regional championship over LSU, the Golden Eagles celebrated like they just made history because they did as the first USM team to ever win a regional at Pete Taylor Park.

Less than a year later, the Black and Gold already getting the chance to dogpile again after winning the Sun Belt Tournament title in Montgomery.

But even in the magic of that moment, they were already embracing the 24-hour rule.

Onto the next one for Southern Miss now less than 48 hours away from leading off its run through the Auburn regional with an opening match-up against Samford.

Maybe it’s the one-track mindset of sending Head Coach Scott Berry out the right way or maybe it’s the overwhelming desire of every USM team to turn the program’s tradition of excellence into a tradition of immortality. Carson Paetow said, “In all reality, we’ve still got some more postseason play. I mean it’s pretty cool, first year in the Sun Belt, Coach Berry has been saying, we just missed regular season champs, so that was definitely a lot of motivation. It’s really cool. It’s really fun to win and win a championship, and now we’ve got to regionals and see if we can do the same thing.”

Danny Lynch said, “Winning the Sun Belt Championship is awesome. That’s what we set out to do every year. That’s kind of our first goal is the regular season title. Our second goal is the tournament title, and now we’re looking forward to the regional where our next goal is to win a regional and then the super-regional and then the College World Series. We’re not a – this is awesome. This is great. We’ll celebrate it, and we’re ready for the regional. We’re looking forward to that.”

The Golden Eagles and Bulldogs get the ball rolling at 1 p.m. Friday from Auburn’s Plainsman Park.