- Tournament Central
 
KINGSVILLE – The Tarleton State Texans earned the No. 3 seed in this week's Lone Star Conference Baseball Championships, which will be played May 8-10 at Nolan Ryan Field in Kingsville.
 
This is Tarleton's sixth consecutive appearance in the tournament, which dates back to head coach Bryan Conger's first season at the helm of the Texan Baseball program.
 
The Texans, who finished the regular season 26-22 overall and 16-18 in the LSC, will face No. 2-seeded West Texas A&M (33-17, 21-14 LSC) in the first game of the tournament, which will begin at 11 a.m. on Thursday.
 
The top four LSC baseball teams will meet for the annual LSC Baseball Championship, as LSC Champion Texas A&M-Kingsville is the top seed and the right to host the event. Angelo State is the fourth and final seeded team in the double-elimination event.  
    
As part of the league's partnership with the Comcast SportsNet Houston regional sports network, the championship game(s) Saturday will be aired live on the CSN Houston. The title game will be available via live web streaming as well at http://www.csnhouston.com/page/live.
    
In addition, all the games on Thursday and Friday will be web streamed live. The webcasts are available free of charge. All games will feature live stats as well and all of these features can be found by clicking here to view the tournament central page, provided by JavelinaAthletics.com.
 
A win for the Texans in game one would give Tarleton the rest of the day off and advance the team to Friday's first game, which is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. A loss and the Texans would have to face the losing team of game two between TAMUK and ASU, at 7 p.m. on Thursday in the tournament's first elimination game.
 
The Buffs, who ranked as high as No. 3 in the nation this season according to the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association, went 4-3 against the Texans this season. Tarleton dropped its home series against WT 1-3 before taking two out of three against the Buffs in Canyon.
 
The Texans hit .293 as a team in seven games against WT, recording 68 hits with 14 doubles, a triple and five home runs. WT tallied 85 hits in the season-series, but with a majority of those hits only going for singles as the Buffs managed to register just 11 doubles, one triple and three home runs against the Texan pitching staff.
 
Garrett Kilgore led the way for the Texans at the plate when facing the Buffs, collecting 13 hits in 22 plate appearances for a .565 batting average. The senior first baseman tallied four doubles, scored eight runs and drove in three runs as well. Rustin Thomas batted .350 against WT with two doubles and a pair of solo home runs. Dalton Weeks drove in a team-high eight runs against WT in just four games of the series.
 
The Texan pitching staff got the best of the two teams, recording an overall earned run average of 3.92, while WT was hit with a 4.94 ERA. Tarleton's Kyle Gottardy went 2-0 in his two appearances against the Buffs, recording a 3.18 ERA with seven K's and just four walks.
 
The Texans defeated WT 6-3 in last season's tournament and are 3-3 against the Buffs all-time in the LSC Championship Tournament