The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee baseball team will travel to Alabama and face No. 4 overall seed Auburn when the NCAA Division I baseball tournament gets under way Friday, May 29.
The Panthers, the lone Division I baseball team in the state of Wisconsin, finished the regular season at 25-31 but held the second seed in the Horizon League Tournament and won the automatic qualifying bid, bolstered by West Bend East alumnus Joey Spence and his walk-off home run to beat Wright State.
The Panthers will play in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010 and fifth time overall.
Auburn (38-19) has matched its highest postseason seed in program history, and the Tigers will naturally be the top team in the pod. Central Florida (31-21) of the Big 12 and North Carolina State (32-22) of the ACC will also compete in UWM’s pod.
The NCAA baseball tournament uses a double-elimination regional format, where the last team standing advances to a one-on-one “super regional” involving a best-of-three series.
Milwaukee and Auburn will clash at noon CT on Friday, followed by UCF-NC State at 5 p.m. The losers will meet in an elimination game at 2 p.m. May 30, with winners facing off at 7 p.m.
On May 31, the two teams with one loss will face off at 2 p.m., with the surviving team needing to beat the 2-0 team twice, beginning at 7 p.m. May 31 or in a winner-take-all game Monday, June 1, if necessary. The winner of the Auburn regional will face the winner of the regional hosted by Nebraska.
Milwaukee has never faced any of the programs in its pod, though it did see another SEC squad when it challenged LSU in February. It also faced another ACC squad, Duke, in late February.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: UW-Milwaukee to face Auburn in NCAA Tournament baseball opener May 29
Reporting by JR Radcliffe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
