Kentucky baseball to host Ball State, Indiana, West Virginia in NCAA tournament regional
LEXINGTON, Ky. — The Kentucky baseball team is back in the NCAA tournament. And the Wildcats won't have to leave home for the first round.
As the tournament's No. 12 overall seed, UK is one of 16 teams that will host a regional this weekend. The Wildcats will face Ball State at noon Friday. The game will air on SEC Network. Indiana and West Virginia are the other two teams in the Lexington Regional.
The winner of Lexington's double-elimination regional will advance to super regional play. If seeding holds, Kentucky will head to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for Super Regionals, taking on the No. 5 national seed, LSU.
This will be the first time Kentucky Proud Park, the Wildcats' home stadium that opened prior to the 2019 season, will host an NCAA regional.
"That's why you invest $49 million into this beautiful stadium: to host postseason events," Kentucky coach Nick Mingione said Monday. "Thankful for our fans who have showed up all year long. Especially thankful for all the former players who put on this jersey and our staff — any former coaches and staff members.
"There's just a lot that goes into this. To be a top-16 team, that didn't happen overnight. There's been a lot of people that have invested a lot of time and effort and energy."
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Kentucky is 36-18 (16-14 SEC) this season, tying for fourth in the league's Eastern Division. UK, as the eighth seed in the SEC tournament, lost in the first round, 4-0, to ninth-seeded Alabama. The Wildcats are 18-16 in Quad 1 games — contests against clubs in the top 50 of the rating percentage index — this season, making them one of the few teams in the country with a winning record in more than 30 Q1 matchups.
This marks UK's second NCAA tournament appearance under Mingione. The first NCAA berth of Mingione's tenure came in his record-setting debut season in 2017, when he won the SEC Coach of the Year award and the Wildcats reached a super regional for the first time in program history.
"Someone asked Thomas Edison one time what it felt like to fail 10,000 times when he was trying to invent the light bulb," Mingione said, "and his answer was, 'I never failed one time. It just happened to be a 10,000-step process.' And that's how I feel."
UK owns an 18-19 all-time record in the NCAA tournament.
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For Darren Williams, a right-handed pitcher from Maysville who transferred to UK prior to the 2022 season, the opportunity to represent his home state in the postseason was hard to put into words. Especially after missing out on the NCAA tournament in his four seasons at Eastern Kentucky.
"It's taken a lot of work," he said. "You look back at all the 6 a.m. workouts and all the fall practices and (me) coming back from the (elbow injury), it's all worth it right now. I'm pumped to get to be a part of this."
Reach Kentucky men’s basketball and football reporter Ryan Black at rblack@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter at @RyanABlack.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentucky NCAA baseball tournament 2023: Indiana in Lexington Regional
