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There’s a lot of Mississippi at the College World Series

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Ole Miss is in Omaha, but there's a lot more of Mississippi at the 2022 College World Series

We knew last week there would be a strong Mississippi flavor to the 2022 College World Series. That's because we knew Ole Miss and Southern Miss were playing for the right to go to Omaha.

Rick Cleveland

But we didn't know the half of it.

Ole Miss swept Southern Miss and arrived in Omaha Wednesday. There, the Rebels, with their 11 Mississippi natives on the roster, will likely bump into several others with strong Mississippi ties.

Start with the Auburn Tigers, Ole Miss' first round opponent Saturday at 6 p.m. The Auburn is none other than Amory product Butch Thompson, the former pitching coach for John Cohen at Mississippi State. Long before Thompson became a widely respected coach, be was an Amory Wildcats football standout for Mississippi coaching legend Bobby Hall.

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“Butch played defensive end for me way back when,” Hall said. “Tough, tough kid. He was from the Wren community, about three miles due on Highway 78. We had lots of really good, really tough football players from Wren and he was one. His senior year (1987) we made it to the State Championship .”

Thompson, a lefty, also pitched for Amory and then for Itawamba Community College. He retains close ties across the state. Indeed, Bryson Ware, a part-time starter as a junior in the outfield for the Tigers, played high school ball at Germantown, where he was a first-team all-state selection.

Win or lose Saturday, Ole Miss will into another Mississippian on Monday. The Auburn-Ole Miss winner will play the the Arkansas-Stanford winner Monday at 6 p.m. The losers will play Monday at 1 p.m.

Freshman All-American Braden Montgomery of Central, Mississippi's 2021 high school player of the year, is a two-way standout for Stanford. Brady Tygart, a true freshman pitcher from Lewisburg, has been outstanding out of the bullpen for Arkansas.

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Montgomery, Stanford's cleanup hitter and an outstanding defensive outfielder, also started three as a pitcher and pitched in relief in 12 other games. Seems as though there's nothing Montgomery, who hit 18 home runs and drove home 57 runs, can't do in — or in the classroom. He scored a perfect 36 on the ACT, presumably why he turned down what would have been seven-figure contract in professional baseball to attend Stanford.

Says Madison Central baseball coach Patrick Robey, “I am lucky. Some guys coach their entire lives and never get to coach one as great as Braden. The young man is just so talented and so focused. Nothing he does surprises me.”

Should Ole Miss and Stanford play one another on Monday, the game would feature a rematch of Ole Miss freshman left hander Hunter Elliott pitching to Montgomery, as happened in the first game of last year's 6A North State championship series when Madison Central played Elliott's High School. Montgomery won a 2-0 pitchers duel in what Robey called “one of the best high school baseball games I've ever seen.”

Both Elliott and Montgomery were honored this season as freshmen All-Americans. So, too, was Arkansas' Tygart. The strapping right-hander, who played for Lewisburg and lives in Hernando, pitched in 23 games out of the bullpen for the Razorbacks and led the team in saves with eight — more than twice as many as any other on the pitching staff. He struck out 51 batters in 37.2 innings.

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Think about it: Three of the key pitchers on three different teams on one side of the College World Series bracket all pitched just last year in the Mississippi Class 6A baseball tournament.

Says Robey, the Madison Central coach, “It just shows how much talent — and how good the baseball is — in Mississippi. I mean, we've got Mississippi State, the defending national champion in college baseball, and Pearl , which won the national junior college championship, and Ole Miss and Southern both in a Super Regional. All of them have a lot of Mississippi guys. It's amazing, really, and it just keeps getting better and better and better.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi News

Warming trend for Easter weekend – Home – WCBI TV

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www.wcbi.com – Isaac Williams – 2024-03-28 04:08:29

SUMMARY: The weather in Columbus, Mississippi will be cold in the mornings but warm up in the afternoons for the Easter . Thursday will be sunny with highs in the 60s, dropping to the 30s at night with patchy frost. Friday will have highs in the 70s, and the weekend will be even warmer with temperatures in the 80s and no rain expected. Next will see warm and humid with the possibility of scattered showers and thunderstorms on Tuesday. It is still unsure if the storms will be severe.

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Two Rankin County teens arrested for shooting death of 14-year-old in Jackson

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www.wjtv.com – Kaitlin Howell – 2024-03-27 19:16:28

SUMMARY: Two teenagers from Rankin County, Maxle Mooneyham, 16, and John Foote, 17, were in connection to the shooting of 14-year-old Cameron Horne-Crook in . The suspects were charged with murder and were assisted in their arrest by Rankin County deputies and Pearl . Horne-Crook was shot multiple times on March 25 in the 3500 block of Ridgecrest . He was a student at Northwest Rankin Middle School. The names of the suspects were corrected by Jackson police in an updated announcement.

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Mississippi News

Blending past, future: Redeveloping Burns Bottom

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www.wcbi.com – Shawanda Jones – 2024-03-27 19:01:33

SUMMARY: The Burns Bottom neighborhood in Columbus, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is being considered for by the Columbus Redevelopment Authority. The plan is to develop the area into a mix of commercial buildings, residential homes, and apartment spaces to meet the needs of the community, workers from the base and industrial sectors. The aims to tie together different parts of Columbus, including the Riverwalk and area. A public meeting will be held on March 28 to discuss for the project. The CRA believes this redevelopment will bring new to the neighborhood and benefit the entire community.

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The post Blending past, future: Redeveloping Burns Bottom appeared first on www.wcbi.com

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