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Can Mississippi State and Southern Miss baseball teams win tough regional tournaments on the road this weekend and advance to the NCAA Super Regionals? Glad you asked.

Answer: Of course, they can. But it will not be easy, especially where Southern Miss is concerned.

The Golden Eagles, winners of 14 of their last 15 and the Sun Belt Conference Tournament championship, were sent to overall No. 1 seed Tennessee at Knoxville. It’s not a baseball death sentence, but it’s whatever comes closest.

State, which had hopes of hosting its own regional and probably should have, goes to Virginia where the host team won 26 of its 33 games this spring. The Cavaliers are not Tennessee, but they are not shabby, especially at the plate. 

Here are 10 things to know about what’s ahead for State and USM this weekend:

1. State’s first-round foe St. John’s is no pushover. State skipper Chris Lemonis is correct when he says of the Red Storm: “It’s just tough, hard-nosed, New York kids. Most of them are from the New York area and you’re playing against tough kids.” In its only shot at SEC competition this season, St. John’s beat Florida on the road. The Red Storm was 5-4 this season against Top 50 RPI teams. They have an ace and there’s a lot of him. Sophomore Mario Pesca, straight out of the Bronx, is 6-1 with a 2.94 ERA in 70 1/3 innings pitched, holding opponents to a .227 batting average. 
2. To get through the four-team regional, State must get more production from its power guys, Dakota Jordan and Hunter Hines. Jordan leads the Bulldogs with 17 home runs. Hines hit 15. They had one hit between them in four games of the SEC Tournament and neither has homered since Hines hit one of May 17 against Missouri.
3. Get past St. John’s and the Bulldogs would likely face host Virginia, which has won 10 of its last 13 games. The Wahoos can slug with anybody, but the pitching, especially starting pitching, is dicey. Virginia hit .342 with 113 home runs as a team. Furthermore, Virginia boasts 11 sluggers with 100 or more at bats who hit .294 or above.
4. Virginia is one of only four teams to host NCAA Regionals in both 2023 and 2024. Last year, the Hoos swept through their regional with three straight victories and then went two and out in the College World Series.
5. State hasn’t played in the post-season since winning the College World Series in 2021. This will be St. John’s 38th NCAA Tournament appearance but first since 2018.
6. Tennessee, the No. 1 seed and betting favorite to win the College World Series, is an intimidating 33-3 at home in Lindsey Nelson Stadium. That said, Southern Miss should know that the Vols are not invincible. In the 2023 Super Regional at Hattiesburg, the Golden Eagles defeated Tennessee 5-3 in Game One and had the Vols down 4-0 in Game Two with All American Tanner Hall on the mound. You know what happened next. Tennessee rallied to win Game Two and then blanked the Eagles 5-0 in Game 3 to advance to the CWS.
7. Southern Miss won the Sun Belt Tournament without the services of one its top sluggers, right fielder Carson Paetow, who is questionable for the Regional. Clearly, the Eagles need all hands on deck, it will be a game-time decision on Paetow, still recovering from a sprained right wrist.
8. No matter what happens at Knoxville and beyond, USM’s decision to elevate Christian Ostrander to head coach appears to be an exceptionally good one. Despite losing 70 percent of last season’s plate production, an All American ace and an All American closer, USM has won 41 games. Ostrander also has had to navigate several key injuries, besides Paetow’s, to achieve an eighth straight 40-victory season and second straight conference championship for the Eagles.
9. Indiana, playing the percentages, has decided to go with left-hander Ty Bothwell (6-3, 4.90 ERA), a sixth-year senior on the mound Friday. Percentages? Southern Miss hit .306 against right-handers, .263 against lefties this year.
10. No announcement has been made yet, but expect Southern Miss to go with Billy Oldham against Indiana in the first game. Oldham was excellent against Tennessee in the Super Regional last year, but Ostrander apparently has decided to go with Oldham Friday, which means Niko Mazza will likely throw on Saturday. 

The post Ten things to know about Regionals for Miss. State, Southern Miss appeared first on Mississippi Today.

RAYMOND — For the hundred or so Raymond residents who came to Tuesday’s Hinds County Planning Commission meeting about a proposed solar array, being able to see or hear what was going on was a luxury. The dozens of those who couldn’t fit into the packed, stuffy library room resigned to either peaking their heads in from the hallway or waiting outside in the 90 degree heat.

The focus of the meeting centered around a small group of representatives from the Virginia-based company Apex Clean Energy. The group, sweating in their collared shirts, stood before the Planning Commission to pitch what they argued was a huge economic opportunity for Hinds County: new jobs, tax revenue, and the chance to attract other businesses wanting to use solar energy.

After hearing everyone’s remarks, the Planning Commission ultimately voted against recommending the projects. But the final say rests with the Hinds County Board of Supervisors, who will make its decision at a June 17 meeting in Jackson.

Apex staff said at the meeting they started acquiring leases for the project, officially called “Soul City Solar,” in 2021, but residents said they first found about it during an informational session the company held on May 14.

Most of those residents who came on Tuesday were displeased with the idea. They argued that Raymond — a town of just under 2,000 people — is a venue for nature and open spaces, and, while they understood the allure of new income for the area, filling thousands of acres of land with metal panels sticking out of the ground doesn’t fit in with the town’s image.

“Whereas you would drive down the road and it would just be beautiful countryside, now you’re going to see an 8- to 10-foot cyclone fence,” said Allison Lauderdale, a Raymond resident who’s organized local opposition to the project, told Mississippi Today last week. “I think that’s going to be atrocious.”

Lauderdale started an online petition, which has close to 500 signatures, opposing Soul City Solar.

Tuesday’s meeting was contentious from the jump, as the Planning Commission seemed unprepared for the large turnout.

“Can y’all hear back there?” asked Delmer Stamps, one of the commissioners, explaining that they didn’t have microphones.

“No,” the crowd answered.

“We’re going to have to turn this air conditioner off,” another commissioner said.

“No! Talk louder!” the audience shouted back.

The Apex team then gave its pitch. The installation would use just under 6,000 acres, they explained, leasing property, including farmland, from seven private landowners the company has agreements with. Apex promised to maintain a perimeter of trees around the property so as to hide the panels from their neighbors’ view.

The project would produce 396 megawatts of electricity — in addition to battery storage of up to 70 megawatts — or enough to power 95,000 homes. Soul City Solar would be about twice as big as any solar farm that’s being constructed or currently running in Mississippi. Origis Energy is building a 200 MW plant in Lowndes County, and the largest operating plant is a 175 MW facility that EDP Renewables has in Scott County, former Public Service Commissioner Brent Bailey told Mississippi Today.

While Apex doesn’t have a utility to buy power directly from Soul City Solar, it’s plan is to sell power through the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, a nonprofit that serves as a marketplace for regional power grids.

Apex’s plan, should Hinds County approve the project, is to begin construction next year and have the panels operating by 2027. The company says its investment would bring in $156 million of local tax revenue over the 30 years that Apex is pledging to keep the facility. It would also create 400 construction jobs, along with 10 full-time operational positions.

Resident’s expressed a wide range of concerns, such as whether there would be harmful storm water runoff at the plant or issues recycling the metal panels. While the Environmental Protection Agency has penalized solar companies in the past over runoff violations during construction, Apex’s Tiffany Seavers said the company has plans to prevent such pollution in accordance with state and EPA regulations.

“Some of that will be extended buffers, some of that will be making sure that we have planting down very, very quickly after we have any kind of grading,” Seavers said.

But the most common objections were about the proximity of the panels to people’s homes as well as the potential disruption to the area’s wildlife.

“I don’t think everybody here is against solar, they’re against the location of this solar farm,” resident David Kazery said at the meeting. “We respect your hustle, but this venture could be done elsewhere that is more rural. I know y’all think that this is an extremely rural area, but there’s a lot of people here.”

Brian O’Shea, director of Public Engagement for Apex, said Soul City Solar will be at least 300 feet from other occupied properties. Other company officials reiterated at the meeting that the private landowners made the decision to lease their property for this use.

“We are working with landowners who chose to work with us,” Chris Hawk, a development manager for Apex, said. “They will continue to be the landowners at the end of the project. We will return the land to them for them to continue to use as they see fit, whether that’s farming or any other venture.”

It’s proposal, the company explained, is for Soul City Solar to exist for at least 30 years, and that it will be responsible for decommissioning and recycling the solar panels at the “end of (the panels’) useful life.”

The project would include “agricultural fencing” and “wildlife corridors” to allow animals to move throughout the space, Hawk added. Residents testified that deer, turkeys, and even black bears roamed the area.

Throughout the public comment period, residents passionately expressed their disagreement with the idea.

“I was offered money for my land (for Soul City Solar),” said Bolton resident Mike Brewer. “It’s not about the money for us. Y’all are the greedy bastards.”

Nicole McWilliams, a Raymond resident, fought back tears talking about her concerns over runoff from the solar array, especially because of the farmland that Soul City would occupy.

“The construction that we’re fixing to do is on so much acreage of agricultural land, and there’s been pesticides and there’s been chicken manure,” McWilliams said. “This is our community, so it means a lot to me.”

The Board of Supervisors’ meeting to decide whether to approve Soul City Solar will be on June 17 at 9 a.m. at the Hinds County Chancery Court.

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After one of the busiest baseball weekends of the year, Southern Miss first baseman Matthew Russo – one of the hottest players on one of the hottest teams in college baseball – joins the podcast to discuss the Golden Eagles’ Sun Belt Conference championship and upcoming NCAA Regional at Knoxville. There’s plenty more to discus, including Davis Riley’s PGA Tour victory.

Stream all episodes here.

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Jackson is laying the groundwork to use data across city departments and use it to address, initially, youth crime, homelessness and infrastructure needs. 

Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba is a member of the Bloomberg Philanthropies City Data Alliance, which trains mayors to understand data and use it to make decisions that can improve city services.

“If we don’t have proper data about where we stand, we can’t set sufficient goals of where we want to go in the future,” Lumumba said, adding that data also allows goals to be measured and followed.  

Twenty mayors from North and South America are part of the cohort, which met last spring. The mayor said the program is an opportunity to learn from other city leaders and see what Jackson is doing well. As part of a network of mayors, he can reach out to them even after the program is over.

James Anderson, head of government innovation programs for Bloomberg Philanthropies, said the mayor joined the program last year with an ambitious application that articulated a vision of changing a work culture that did not use data before. 

The use of data, including in city settings, has been a trend for the past decade, but the Bloomberg program is looking for mayors who want to take greater steps, Anderson said. 

For example, Jackson is now one of the few cities across America with a formal citywide data strategy, he said. 

“This alliance was the next step to help the most ambitious cities make ambitious gains,” Anderson said. 

Lumumba hopes using data can help the city be more proactive in its decision making and dealing with crises. As part of the citywide strategy, departments are also getting help with accessing data, understanding it and using it more in their daily work. 

One of his goals is to use data to reduce youth violence by addressing root causes of violence. 

Data has helped the city see that the sharpest increase in violence has been youth, and that has led to focused efforts for that population, such as work through the Office of Violence Prevention & Trauma Recovery and a youth curfew approved at the beginning of the year.

One challenge of a youth curfew is finding a place to house those who violate it, Lumumba said. There is a county facility, the Henley-Young Juvenile Justice Center, but it holds those charged with misdemeanors or felonies, including those who face adult criminal charges. 

A way to provide space for youth to go and to give them access to programs is through curfew centers, which Lumumba said are in the works. In a March episode of a city talk show, he said there are plans to partner with a local church to open a curfew center.

Lumumba envisions the center as a place staffed with social workers and professionals to provide young people with extra curricular activities and teach them conflict resolution skills. 

Through the program, another of the mayor’s goals is to use data to get Jackson to “functional zero” homelessness, which is the point where the same number of people entering homelessness exit homelessness in the same month. 

Although Lumumba said there are regional challenges to addressing the issue, recent counts show that 67 of the 93 people experiencing homelessness in central Mississippi were in the metro Jackson area. 

Nearly 1,000 people experienced homelessness in Mississippi in 2023, according to the Annual Homelessness Assessment Report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The common way to get these numbers are through “point-in-time” counts, which are completed annually by continuum-of-care service providers across the country in one day and gives an estimate of sheltered and unsheltered populations. 

Lumumba said he would like data collected in Jackson to go further because the current point-in-time counts are insufficient to understand what circumstances people are facing. Better data can help determine who needs housing and maybe, additionally, services for mental health or substance addiction, he said. 

Lumumba’s last data-related priority is about infrastructure needs and assessing the condition of roads and systems. 

He said a need is clear if residents report a road needing to be paved or a burst pipe. But beyond that, he said there is more work to be done, such as how paving projects relate to each other and how to create more mobility within the city. 

A program like the City Data Alliance can help cities make policy decisions, streamline services and look forward, said Dallas Breen, the executive director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Community Development at Mississippi State University, which provides research, training and services to municipalities, counties and government agencies. 

Like Jackson is doing, Breen said it is helpful to work with a data scientist who can help city leaders and staff and understand the data they are looking at and how to collect it. 

“The more data you have, the more informed your decisions will be,” Breen said.

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And I’m sure Jerry Garcia greeted him next.

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PEARL — So much about the Mississippi sports landscape has changed in my more than half century of chronicling all things athletic in the Magnolia State. Little, if any, has changed more – or for the better – than high school baseball.

That vast improvement has been on regal display for the past five days in the MHSAA State Championships at Trustmark Park, where the baseball was crisply played and often by superbly trained athletes, many of whom you will be watching and reading about for years.

There are several reasons why Mississippi’s college baseball teams are so successful year after year. Chief among them: The talent pool supplied by Mississippi high schools keeps producing top shelf talent.

Think about it: Mississippi State and Ole Miss have won national championships in the past three years. Southern Miss will play in its eighth straight NCAA Regional next week and leads the nation in both consecutive 30-win and 40-win seasons. Delta State is a perennial Division II national power. William Carey is currently playing in the NAIA World Series. Four – count them, four – Mississippi junior colleges rank in the nation’s top 20. 

Baseball talent abounds in Mississippi, where the coaching, the facilities and the community support have all improved dramatically. Gone are the days when assistant football coaches who didn’t even understand the infield fly rule were forced to coach baseball and were more than happy to play only a dozen or so games a season.

Sumrall’s 44-year-old  coach Andy Davis, whose Bobcats defeated Ripley 2-0 Saturday morning for the Bobcats seventh state championship over the past 16 years, has witnessed first-hand the sea change in Mississippi high school baseball. “It’s unreal how much better it’s gotten,” Davis said. “I’m talking about the skill level, the technology, the coaching, the support, the facilities, the emphasis on baseball.”

Davis’ baseball life has come full circle. Twenty-seven years ago, Andy Davis pitched Taylorsville to a state championship victory over Nettleton. This week, his 15-year-old, ninth grade son, Drew, helped pitch and hit Sumrall to a championship in a thoroughly entertaining and ultra competitive best-of-three series with Ripley.

Get this: Ripley’s Ty Long struck out 27 batters, allowed four hits and zero runs in 13 innings of a three-game state championship series – and he lost. Said Andy Davis, “I’ve been coaching baseball for 24 years and he’s the best pitcher any of my teams has ever faced.”

But this state tournament has been a showcase of remarkable talent. No telling how many games and championships Drew Davis will win before his high school career ends in May of 2027. He was Sumrall’s best pitcher as an eighth-grader, which is saying something when you realize the Bobcats’ No. 2 starter Leo Odom, a junior, already has committed to play at Ole Miss. Drew Davis, 13-0 for Sumrall as an eighth-grader, played and pitched for Team USA (under-15) in international competition last season.

Sumrall’s No. 3 pitcher Landon Hawkins, a junior who is also Sumrall’s football quarterback, pitched a four-hit shutout Saturday. “Landon’s our leader and he has played everything but catcher for us,” Andy Davis said. “I’d go to battle every day with him. He was a legend out there today.”

Future college and junior college stars were all over the Trustmark Park diamond throughout the week. Brandon lefty Walker Hooks, an Ole Miss signee, helped pitch the Bulldogs to the Class 7A championship, besting Hernando, which was led by Mississippi State signee Topher Jones and another Ole Miss signee, Thomas Mitchell. Junior center fielder Jaumaurion Jones, a Southern Miss commitment, scored the only run in Brandon’s 1-0 championship victory. St. Andrews won the Class 2A title, despite expert pitching from Mississippi State commitment Landon Harmon of East Union. There were so many more stars shining brightly this week, but that gives you an idea.

None shined more brightly than Ripley’s pitcher-shortstop Long, who has signed to play his college ball at Southern Miss. Ripley coach Joel Gafford called Long “the kind of player you are lucky if you get to coach one like him once in your career.” 

Andy Davis, the Sumrall coach, embraced Long post-game and later told about their brief conversation. “I told him he’s a stud and that I can’t wait to watch him when he’s at USM. If they cloned him nine times, it’d be one heck of a baseball team because he pitches, he competes, he defends and he’s a tough out. You just have to tip your cap to that kid.”

And you can tip it to Mississippi high school baseball while you’re at it.

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Desmond Green spent about two years behind bars charged with a capital murder he didn’t commit.

A Jackson police detective “used a lying, drug-impaired jailhouse informant to lock Green up,” U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves wrote Monday in response to Green’s 2023 lawsuit. “The detective also steered the informant to select Green’s face from a photo lineup. It was a horrifying wrong.”

Reeves wrote that the horror continued in the Hinds County Detention Center, which was “full of violence, rodents, and moldy food. He says there was ‘constant yelling, fighting and threats.’ Green ‘often did not have a mattress, or even a pad, to sleep on, and slept on the floor.’ He ‘constantly feared for his life.’”

The informant recanted. The state dropped the charges, but the ordeal still cost Green about two years in jail.

Last year, he filed a lawsuit against the city of Jackson and others.

“Green filed this lawsuit to seek justice for those two wrongs — his prosecution and conditions of confinement,” Reeves wrote. “He has sued the detective who locked him up, her employer (the City of Jackson, Mississippi), and the operator of the Hinds County Detention Center.”

Now, the judge wrote, Green is “on the precipice of being wronged a third time. Not by a rogue officer or jailer, but by the law itself. Because the detective says the legal doctrine of qualified immunity requires the Court to dismiss Green’s claims against her.”

“Qualified immunity is an unconstitutional error. It is past time for the judiciary to correct this mistake.”

— U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves

In his Monday decision, Reeves paved the way for the lawsuit to go forward. He rejected defense claims that the litigation should be dismissed because of the qualified immunity doctrine, which the U.S. Supreme Court created in 1967.

That doctrine “means persons wronged by government agents cannot sue those agents unless the Supreme Court previously found substantially the same acts to be unconstitutional,” the judge wrote. “A cynic might say that with qualified immunity, government agents are at liberty to violate your constitutional rights as long as they do so in a novel way.”

But Green didn’t stop at suing for justice and damages. He wants to bring an end to qualified immunity, and many lawyers, professors and judges have sided with him.

“The Court agrees with these calls for change,” Reeves wrote. “Congress’s intent to protect citizens from government abuse cannot be overridden by judges who think they know better. As a doctrine that defies this basic principle, qualified immunity is an unconstitutional error. It is past time for the judiciary to correct this mistake.”

On Feb. 13, 2020, someone shot Nicholas Robertson, who knocked on the door of Avery Forbes’ home in Jackson and died there.

Two months later, police arrested Samuel Jennings on an unrelated charge. He told police that Desmond Green told him that he had killed Robertson.

The accusation stunned Green, who told police he didn’t know Robertson, much less take part in his murder.

Despite that, Detective Jacquelyn Thomas and Hinds County prosecutors encouraged the grand jury to indict Green, who was jailed without bond, with armed robbery being the underlying felony that elevated it to capital murder.

Two years later, Jennings recanted, blaming the statement on meth abuse and told authorities he suffered from a variety of mental issues. He said he initially pointed to the first photo in a photo lineup, only to have the detective steer him instead to the fifth photo, which was Green.

As a result, prosecutors remanded the case to the file, and Green finally went free in 2022.

Green worked as a brick mason before suffering a series of tragedies. He had 28 inches of his colon removed because of diverticulitis. His mother died of kidney failure, and his father had stage 4 lung cancer that went into his brain.

“They died seven months apart,” said his sister, Jackie.

After that, Green was jailed in 2020 for capital murder in the killing of Robertson, a man he said he never knew and never met.

On the night of the homicide, he said, “I was at home, trying to do everything you do to not be in trouble. I was at home in my bed, asleep.”

Despite that, he was arrested, put in jail and refused bond.

Inside the jail, he said he was put on lockdown, sometimes going up to two weeks without a shower.

He lost the home he had for more than seven years, he lost time with his seven children, and he returned home with a limp. “It hurt me to walk,” he said.

His arms remained sore because of all the nights he slept on concrete. “The jail was overcrowded,” he said. “We sometimes had five or six people” to a cell intended for two.

The 43-year-old still suffers from nightmares from his time behind bars. “I saw people murdered in the jail,”  he said. “I feel very paranoid, like I’m always being watched. It’s hard for me to be around a lot of people.”

He said another charge is still pending against him that he has yet to be indicted for — grand larceny.

“They claimed I was stealing water,” he said, “but that wasn’t true.” In reality, he said, there was no water to steal because firefighters shut off his water after his neighbor’s home burned down.

Law enforcement officers need to thoroughly investigate before putting people behind bars, he said. “There was no evidence showing I was involved, so why was I arrested?”

The system needs to be improved, he said. “My life was on the line the whole time, and I was never allowed to speak to the judge until two years later. I lost time that I’ll never get back.”

Tupelo attorney Jim D. Waide III, who is representing Green, said he thinks Reeves’ opinion comes closer than any previous opinion to making the Supreme Court review the doctrine.

In addition to the opinion of Reeves, who was nominated by then-President Barack Obama in 2010, Judge Don R. Willett of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, one of then-President Trump’s nominees in 2017, has also questioned the doctrine.

In 2018, Willett criticized “the kudzu-like creep of the modern immunity regime” and explaining how the doctrine “smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly.”

In other words, “it’s immaterial that someone acts unconstitutionally if no prior case held such misconduct unlawful,” Willett wrote. “Immunity ought not be immune from thoughtful reappraisal.”

In the years following the end of the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists “unleashed waves of terrorism across the South,” Reeves wrote.

In response, he wrote that Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 to help protect Black Americans because state courts “left the terrorism committed by various militant groups seeking control in the South unchecked.”

For decades, he wrote, the high court never recognized a “good-faith immunity,” but that changed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that Jackson police officers who arrested ministers who entered a whites-only waiting room were immune from litigation because the officers were acting in “good faith.”

In creating this qualified immunity, justices “protected the Southern officials still violating those federal rights 100 years after the War ended,” Reeves wrote. “Southern trees bear strange fruit, indeed. It is difficult to see qualified immunity’s creation as anything other than a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.”

Such “immunity,” he wrote, has led to the protection of correctional officers holding a person naked in a frigid cell, “covered in other person’s feces,” police officers stealing $225,000 in cash and rare coins, and police officers killing someone inside a car because “the law clearly established only that an officer would not shoot a person from outside a car.”

Reeves called for judges to let juries decide instead.

Jurors can be instructed that federal law gives people the right to be free “from unconstitutional action under color of state law” and also that unnecessary suits against public officers run the risk of diverting “energy from pressing public issues” and deterring “able citizens from acceptance of public office,” he wrote.

The Constitution is full of such tensions, he wrote. “Its authors in one breath declared all men to be created equal, and in the other calculated a slave to be worth three-fifths of a white person. Contradiction is in America’s DNA.”

Jurors “know the difference between those acting properly and those violating others’ rights,” he wrote. “Their work confirms that when it comes to fact-finding, ‘anything a judge can do a jury can do better. It takes a special type of arrogance simply to conclude that American jurors cannot.’”

As a citizen, “Desmond Green has suffered two injustices,” the judge wrote. “The judiciary should not impose a third. If qualified immunity would do that, closing the courthouse doors to his claims, then the doctrine should come to its overdue end.”

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