MT. CARMEL, Ill. -- The road to Grand Junction begins at home for the Wabash Valley baseball team.
The third-ranked Warriors open post-season play on Thursday in the NJCAA Region 24A tournament, being played at Fournier Field.
This first step is a four-team, double elimination tournament. The winner gets a berth in the NJCAA Midwest District tournament in Iowa, another four-team affair.
From there, it is on to the Juco World Series in Grand Junction, Colorado for the winner. That is a 10-team event that begins on May 27.
Last year, the Warriors won their first three games in Colorado, before eventually finishing in fourth place.
Aaron Biddle will take his first Warrior team into the post-season. Hall of Famer Rob Fournier resigned last year and is now an assistant coach at Western Kentucky. Not that Biddle will be a stranger to the bright lights – he was an assistant under Fournier for seven years before taking the reins.
Wabash Valley (46-10), the No. 1 seed overall in Region 24, will play Frontier (25-25) in the opening game on Thursday at 12 noon CDT. In the second game at 3 p.m. Lincoln Trail (32-16) will face Lake Land (21-32).
The tourney continues Friday morning at 9:30 a.m. with the first elimination game between the losers of Friday's games. At 12:30 p.m., the first-day winners will play. The second elimination game comes next, at 3:30 p.m. when the winner of the day's first game meets the loser from the preceding contest.
By Saturday, there will be only two teams left – one of them undefeated. The game begins at 12 noon and the team with one loss must win to force a winner-take-all game at 3 p.m.
The Warriors come in with the nation's sixth best offense, with a team batting average of .356. They are second in on-base percentage (.487), second in walks (370), third in runs scored (561), fourth in runs batted in (504) and seventh in hits (607).
The pitching staff is also listed in the top 10, with a team earned run average of 3.67, good for ninth.
Wabash Valley is 9-1 against teams in this weekend's field. They are 4-0 vs. Lincoln Trail, 3-0 vs. Frontier, and 2-1 against Lake Land.
Lincoln Trail is 6-4 against the field, while Frontier and Lake Land both stand 2-7.
There are two Region 24 tournaments going on simultaneously. The No. 2 overall seed, John A. Logan, is hosting the other in Carterville.
Thursday, the first game pits Logan (39-14), ranked 18th in this week's poll, against Rend Lake (21-28), followed by Southwestern (41-14) vs. Kaskaskia (25-25).
The two Region 24 winners join the champion from Region 4 (northern Illinois) and Region 11 (Iowa) at the District tournament, hosted by the Region 11 winner.