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Show Rugged road for j SU baseballers j The schedule remains plenty rugged for the Southern Utah State College baseball team this week; Friday and Saturday the Thun-derbirds Thun-derbirds challenge Northern Arizon University of the Big Sky Conference in a pair of doubleheaders at Flagstaff. Things don't slack off at all early the following week when the 'Birds move to Provo to test Brigham Young University in doubleheaders Tuesday and Wednesday. Complicating the SUSC situation is the resignation of Coach Hack Mitchell, who left the team for personal reasons last week. Interim In-terim Coach Don Conrad, who will serve out the season is still evaluating the club, but his early impessions are good. "Basically, I think this is an excellent ball club. What effect the coaching transition will have is uncertain. It's just one of those things that we'll have to wait and see what happens. The worst enemy of this team this year has been weather," Conrad said. SUSC improved its record to 5-6 last week by sweeping three straight from Mesa College, a perennial Rocky Mountain Athletic 1 Conference power. The 'Birds had to move all three games to St. George to beat the bad weather. 1 Conrad has his pitching rotation pretty much ' figured out. Either Scott Bergerhouse (1-0) or i Todd Mortensen (2-2) will start the first NAU game ' Friday. Don Gubler (2-2) will go in the second game. Saturday's starters will probably be either Bergerhouse or Mortensen and Mark Johnson (10-10 All four are righthanders. . Darren Garrick, who has been strong in relief, may start Sasturday's second game provided he remedies some minor eligibility problems. "We will also look to Kevin Donner and Dave Mid-dleton Mid-dleton for relief help, if it becomes necessary.," Conrad says. SUSC team hitting improved nine percentage per-centage points in the Mesa series. Although the team average is still only .146, it has improved markedly in recent games. Gary CowarFlju.. ar, Spanish Fork) leads the team with a classy .526 average. He also has a sluggish average of .894. Third baseman Pat Kilgore. (junior, Puyallup, Wash) is hitting hit-ting .333 and has shown dramatic improvement recently. Curt Peterson (junior, Cedar City), outfielder, is hitting .303. Cowart leads the team in home runs with two. First baseman Rus Turner (senior, Las Vegas, Nev.) and second baseman Jeff DuMont (junior, Albany, Ore) are tops in runs batted in with seven and six respectively. respec-tively. In the past week, the club's combined earned run average dropped by nearly two and one-half points to 6.35. Gubler (senior, Santa Clara), Mortensen(senior, Sanford, Colo.), Garrick (sophomore, Kearns) , and Donner (iunior, RuDerU Idaho) . |