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By KEVIN ECKLEBERRY

Daily News

It’s been a long time coming.

Eleven months after the 2020 season was cut short because of COVID-19, the Troup Tigers returned to the field on Wednesday for a preseason baseball game against Woodward Academy.

It was a winning day for Troup, which beat Woodward Academy 7-3 in preparation for Monday’s season opener at Northgate.

“We’ve still got a lot of work to do, but we feel very good about where we are,” said Tanner Glisson, Troup’s first-year head coach. “It was good to get out there and play another opponent other than ourselves. We saw a lot of good things, and the guys competed well, and that’ll give us a little confidence going into Monday.”

It was, Glisson pointed out, a nice way for the players to be in a competitive situation before they start playing for keeps next week.

“We didn’t throw everybody on the mound, but we tried to stay with our starting eight,” Glisson said. “We did some moving around, but we pretty much played it by the book just to try to get one game under our belt.”

Many of the players were a part of the 2020 team that saw their season end in the middle of March, and Glisson said they “were itching to get out.”

“I felt we were a little bit tight early, but after we were able to take a deep breath after the first inning, we played some good baseball,” Glisson said. “Some inexperience showed up in some situations, so we’ll have to go back and work on that. We’ve got a couple of football guys out here playing baseball for the first time, and there were some mental errors and things like that we’ll get corrected.”

After playing a doubleheader at Northgate on Monday, Troup will play three games in two days next weekend in the Georgia Dugout Club tournament at the LakePoint complex in Emerson.

“We’re ready to play, ready to get to get started,” Glisson said. “We know we have a very challenging schedule in front of us. We’ll find out real quickly, because we’ll play Northgate twice on Monday, and then we’ll go up to LakePoint and play three games against three quality opponents. We’ll figure out real quick where we are.”