The Tulane Green Wave baseball team kicks off their 2026 campaign on Friday in Los Angeles with high hopes.
The Tulane Green Wave baseball team kicks off their 2026 campaign on the road in Los Angeles starting Friday night against the Loyola Marymount Lions from Feb. 13 to Feb. 15. The series will be streamed on ESPN+ and can be heard locally in New Orleans on WRBH, 88.3 FM. As we broke down on Roundtable, the Green Wave announced their pitching rotation for the weekend, with the slate kicking off Friday with graduate student Trey Cehajic getting the start, who went 2-2 in his second year with the team with a 4.89 ERA in 57 innings pitched. The Lions will start their weekend off with sophomore righty, Zach Bender, who went 1-1 last season with a 3.99 ERA in 29.1 innings pitched.
Tulane will start lefty Beau Sampson on Saturday, who is a transfer from University of Oklahoma. The junior went 1-0 with 10 strikeouts in 10.2 innings pitched out of the bullpen for the Sooners. Against Sampson, Loyola Marymount will counter with Jonah Johnson, who went 5-2 last year with a 5.14 ERA in 35 innings pitched. To close out the weekend slate, sophomore righty Jake Frankel will start for the Wave in his first year with the program. At Liberty last season, Frankel went 4-3 with a 3.40 ERA in 45 innings pitched. He’ll face off against righty Avery Laine, who went 5-1 for the Lions last season with a 4.81 ERA in 67.1 innings pitched.
Tulane leads the all-time series by a 4-2 count, with the Green Wave winning two of three games against LMU last season. It will be the first time that the Wave will face the Lions in Los Angeles, with all previous contests played in New Orleans. It also will be an important test for Tulane’s performance on the West Coast, something that has shown struggles in past performances. The Wave are 24-24 all-time against current schools in the West Coast Conference. The team’s last meeting with a WCC team was last season against Pepperdine, where Tulane lost the series 1-2, losing a pair of one-run games before winning the final game.
Speaking with Tulane on Sports Illustrated, Tulane head baseball coach Jay Uhlman acknowledged some of those prior struggles on the West Coast and how the team was looking to combat that. The team scrimmaged at 8,5, and 3 last weekend, to simulate the local times for the games at Loyola this weekend, as well as looking to educate the players on the struggles of traveling east to west – the converse, west to east, is always easier.
“Trying to take care of that, and then trying to be ready to go,” Uhlman said. “Try to do a few things different, maybe with travel and when we practice and when we lift, but ultimately it still comes down to the guys on the field and are they prepared or are they not.”
Well, the team has hopes to head to the NCAA tournament, and the first step towards that goal is a win in game one against the Lions.