Here's a portion of what Iowa's 13th-year coach told the media after the Hawkeyes' 6-5 win on May 2.
Question: Illinois makes a bit of a run there late with a couple of runs. They talk about Heller ball, but they tried to copy Heller ball, you guys put a stop to it, just talking about that play in particular, to find a way to get the stop there and keep the lead.
RICK HELLER: I'm glad it worked out for us. We didn't. We didn't execute it exactly the way we draw it up in practice each week, but it worked out in the end.
On the pitching staff ....
I thought Maddox gave us another great start. You know, we're we were pushing him, trying to, trying to get if that inning would have went clean. And unfortunately, you know, Coop don't make many errors, but he made an error that extended that inning. And, you know, we get out of that clean, then he might have been able to sneak another one. We might have been able to sneak another one out, out of Maddox. But it was, it was a great start. Unfortunately, Guy was sitting on first pitch, breaking ball and and hits a home run, and he gives up three runs late. But to shut them out, I mean, to shut them out that long, that was, I thought he pitched really, really good today.
You're forced to make the move and put Jaixen Frost in the lineup. And then it pays off with the home run. Just how big was that. Oh, man, go to him right before the game and say, Hey, you're actually starting, and he comes through in a big spot.
Thank goodness we flipped it, and he stepped up and hits a big home run. And that was a big home run to get us a lead.
We talked to Gable [Mitchell] and he mentioned that he never felt like, even when things were going poorly, that the team stopped playing for each other, or stopped giving effort. Is it just one of those things where you get the series win over Maryland, and there's a little bit of momentum, and then it leads into the midweeks, where you get a double midweek, and it leads into Indiana and now it continues?
A little bit, yeah, yeah. And it goes back before that, because you kind of find out about yourself when things aren't going good, you know, it's pretty easy to to be the good teammate and, you know, positive guy when, when you're winning a lot of games, as you know, when we went had, you know, we were struggling, got swept at USC was kind of the ending point. And we just everybody, we all, we all just sat down and talked about, you know, there's a lot of good things left if we keep doing things right, training the right way, playing for the right reasons, play for each other, play hard and not worry about the results. Good things are usually right around the corner when you think things are the bleakest.