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A boy about five or six years old, decked out in Hokie gear, approached the Virginia Tech dugout with his father and a baseball in hand. He was too afraid to ask for autographs from the dejected players covered in mud.
Tech had been swept in a three-game series by their archrival from Charlottesville on a soggy English Field on Sunday.
"I want them to feel sorry that we got beat," said Tech coach Pete Hughes after the 8-5 loss to Virginia. "We have a 24-hour rule with these guys to feel sorry about it and then we come to practice on Tuesday and get to work. We have to be focused on just the next game. We've got too many games left in the ACC to really let losses linger and hang around in our head."
Five straight losses. Tech is no stranger to a losing streak of that caliber. Last season, the Hokies had a five-game and a seven-game losing streak. You have to go back to the beginning of the 2005 season to find a winning streak that long by the Hokies.
Twenty-four hours is tough to swallow for all of the guys who devote their lives to this team. To make matters worse, the Hokies (15-13, 4-7 ACC) have lost eight of the last 11 games. It's time for somebody to step up. Just like any other college sport, it starts at the top. When it comes down to brass tacks, it starts with Nate Parks, Bryan Thomas, Adam Redd and Warren Schaeffer.
"We need our senior leadership right now," Hughes said. "Like anything else, you get your seniors going and you can do some things you want to do, especially when you're on a little losing skid and guys want to feel sorry for themselves and get out of their work mode. You need your senior leaders to get everybody back into gear and at the right tempo."
That tempo needs to start tomorrow night against VMI. Talk about a rivalry, the Hokies and the Keydets date back further than Tech and UVa. The ol' VMI-VPI series started during the second Grover Cleveland administration (that's 1897 for you non-history majors such as myself).
The two military schools don't like each other, which is what good rivalries are all about. Tech owns VMI. Out of 163 games, the Hokies have won 118. That's unheard of, but tomorrow's match-up may mean more than any other in recent history. Righting the ship carries as much significance as beating a classic rival.
This isn't football. VMI and Tech are pretty even. In fact, the Keydets have taken down some good teams like Florida and Auburn on the road. Both teams are familiar with each other, which makes for an intriguing game.
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