The Troy Rookie Tournament Team held strong through four innings against the Enterprise Nationals, but fell short in the fifth making crucial fielding errors costing the Rookies the game losing 10-9 against the Nationals.

Rookie head coach Christopher Goshea said the team had started the match-up off strongly coming out with a four to nothing lead in the first inning and successfully carried the momentum over into the second, third and fourth innings but something fell short for the Rookies in the fifth.

“They were just some routine plays that should have been made,” Goshea said. “We had a catcher interference call that cost us a run, and we just had a couple of missteps along the way. They only had six hits the entire game, but they were able to beat us 10-9.”

The Rookies had seen the Nationals play during this past weekend’s tournament in Enterprise, and Goshea said the team knew then they would have to play strong, clean error-free baseball in order to compete with the strong team. But, after the team’s missteps in their Friday matchup against the Nationals, Goshea said he hoped the Rookies had learned to not take any opponent lightly.

“My thoughts from this point forward, is if we lose, we are done,” Goshea said. “I’m hoping my guys learned that you cannot take any appoint lightly. We had a six to one lead and we got lax in the fielding and we had couples of errors that cost us the game.”

After losing Friday, Goshea said that would put the Rookies into the loser’s bracket, but that was the least of his concerns as the boys will have to play games every day until the conclusion of the tournament.

“We will have games from here on out,” Goshea said. “We will not be able to have a day off pretty much. We’re just going to try to keep them well rested and try and manage my pitching staff so I have quality guys to start during the crucial games. This just simply means that now we’ll have to battle from the losing bracket. If we had stayed in the winner’s bracket we would have had a day off on Tuesday.”

The team is traveling back and forth to Eufaula to competition and Goshea said the Rookies would either play Greenville or Eufuala tonight at 8 p.m.