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But there’s still a county angle to the state tourney as Chapmanville High School graduate and former Tiger player Steve Pritchard has led Nitro to this week’s Class AAA state tourney at Charleston’s Appalachian Power Park.
Pritchard, who played for Ted Ellis in the mid-1980s and was a member of Chapmanville High School’s 1987 Class AA state championship team, will skipper his Nitro Wildcats (24-10) against Beckley (17-10) in one of the Triple-A semifinals on Thursday night.
Jefferson (33-4) plays Fairmont Senior (20-16) at 5 p.m. in Thursday’s other Class AAA semifinal.
Pritchard has been to the state tourney before when he guided Sissonville High School to the Class AA state championship in 1996, a year after the Indians had lost in the state finals.
Oddly enough, baseball-rich Nitro is making its first trip to the state baseball tournament since 1982.
“It is hard to believe,” Pritchard said. “I’ve been here six years and we’ve probably had two other teams that we thought were good enough to make it to the state tournament but we just didn’t make it.”
The Wildcats ended the season as an unranked team but got hot at the end when it counted.
After losing 3-1 to No. 4-ranked St. Albans in its Triple-A sectional opener, Nitro beat the Red Dragons by 11-1 and 6-5 scores to claim the section title.
The Wildcats then won 5-1 over Parkersburg and 14-8 over No. 8 Huntington in the regional tourney to advance to “The App.”
“It’s been a great season,” Pritchard said. “We started off slow. We started a lot of young kids and we were trying to find spots to where they should be at. It took us about 10 games to figure it out. It seemed like once we did that we kind of took off and had a great season.”
During the regular season, Pritchard met up with his alma mater Chapmanville as the Wildcats topped the Tigers 9-1 at home. It was the first loss of the season for Chapmanville. Nitro later lost to Chapmanville 3-1 in a game also played at Nitro. The Wildcats also crushed Single-A Man 22-10 at home.
Pritchard said he grew up with Chapmanville coach Eric Ellis.
“I call him
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