by Cade Howard.

For the third consecutive year, the baseball team will be competing in the 7-A state championship game, May 18, at Baum stadium, but this time it will be without head coach Kirk Bock. Because of an altercation at the Fayetteville game, Bock will be serving the final game of his two-game suspension against Rogers-Heritage in the state final. Bock said he will listen to the game on the radio and hopes he will be able to enter the stadium after the game.

Bock believes that his teams “system” will make his absence obsolete in deciding the team’s success.

 “We have a good system,” Bock said. “Whenever someone in the system goes down, we can just replace them with someone else in the system. This is what we did with Dylan Cross this year and Ben Wells two years ago.”

 Senior Ozzie Hurt believes the main thing the team will be missing without Bock is his decision-making and strategy.

 “He usually makes all the calls and decisions and does all the strategizing, but he’s been working with us this week getting us prepared,” Hurt said.

 Senior Jordan Taylor believes as long as the team stays focused and plays like it normally does, it should be fine.

 “We’ve just got to stay focused and play like he [Bock] is there,” Taylor said.

 Assistant coach Elliot Jacobs will be filling in for Bock in the game, and Bock said Jacobs is prepared for the job.

 “Coach Jacobs is a great coach, he has already filled in for me once this year and did a great job, I’m sure he can do it again,” Bock said.

 While Bock wishes he could be in the dugout, he understands that his absence isn’t the end of the world.

“I’d much rather be there. It will be hard not being there, but it’s not the end of the world,” Bock said. “There really isn’t all that much I could do or changes I could make to affect the outcome of the game.”