Sunny skies and temperatures in the 60s ushered in the new week, on Monday afternoon the baseball club at McCaskey had a scrimmage at home. The program's new head coach is a gentleman named Gilbert Vega, he's a 2009 JPM grad who played collegiately at Kutztown University and was most recently an assistant at Penn State-Harrisburg. I hadn't met him previously, before the game I went into the dugout to introduce myself. One of the assistant coaches did the honors for me, Coach Vega's reply was "Oh, Frenchy? The legendary Frenchy!!!" (HIS words, not mine). Right now it looks like there will be at least two games I won't be able to work because of ice hockey but hopefully that will be the extent of it. On Tuesday I was back on 222 for the first of a back-to-back at the Arena, the Worcester Railers were in for a pair of rescheduled games from December 18 and 19. These were the last of the outstanding home makeup games, the club still has two on the road and there's a chance one of them may not be happening. After a tough weekend with Adirondack the Royals got back into the win column with a Tuesday night 6-3 win. Trevor Gooch led the way scoring a hattrick with Patrick Bajkov, Garrett Cockerill and Thomas Ebbing also lighting the lamp. In the Wednesday rematch there were four goals scored in the first five minutes of play and nothing more until the final seconds. Worcester took the early lead just over a minute in, thirty-seven seconds later Frank DiChiara scored from a faceoff to tie it 1-1. Just over a minute later the red-hot Trevor Gooch gave the Royals the lead, one minute and five seconds after that Thomas Ebbing followed up making it 3-1. It stayed that way until the final thirty-five seconds, the Railers scored with the extra attacker but could come no closer as the Royals completed the two-game sweep with a 3-2 win. With Pat Nagle on recall to the Phantoms Hayden Hawkey played both nights in goal and picked up both Ws. The club improves to 36-14-8 overall and 18-6-4 at the Arena, the grind continues with the Norfolk Admirals visiting on Friday and Saturday. Take care, thanks for reading.
