Relaxed and ready

• By RANDY ROSETTA
• Published: Jun 22, 2009 - Page: 1D

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OMAHA, Neb. — For Ryan Schimpf, the pre-game ritual will stay the same: A hug and a kiss for his mom and then it’s off to play another ballgame, just like the thousands he’s played before.

Louis Coleman won’t change things much, either, before he takes the mound for the final time as a starting pitcher for LSU.
And catcher Micah Gibbs looks at this next series just like he would any during the Southeastern Conference season.

Anybody expecting the No. 1-ranked Tigers to change much or be uptight as they approach their first shot at a national championship since 2000 might want to reconsider.

LSU (54-16) and Texas (49-14-1) collide at 6 p.m. today in the opener of the best-of-three national championship series, the culmination of the College World Series as, for the first time, two of college baseball’s standard-bearers meet in the finals.

“By this point of the season, why would you change the way you’re doing anything?” Schimpf said. “We don’t want to change anything. We’re having too much fun.

“I really think we’ll all be relaxed. We’ve been playing here for so long, it just feels like another normal ballgame. Once you get out there, the jitters go away and you can focus in on just winning the ballgame.”

Coleman won’t alter his approach as he takes aim at his 15th victory and getting LSU started off well. He was asked Sunday if he had concerns about Texas’ pesky small-ball approach or the Longhorns’ recent power surge.

“(LSU pitching coach David Grewe) does all that,” Coleman said. “I’ve told him I don’t like to know a whole lot. Just call the pitch and give me a spot, and I’d rather go that way than if I know too much.
“I know these guys can run the ball out of the yard and a guy gets up there and I start worrying about it instead of worrying about my pitches.”

He won’t get any rah-rah speeches from his battery mate, either.
“When I go out there before he throws his first pitch, I’ll just tell him this is just like another SEC game,” Gibbs said. “That’s the way we’ve prepared ourselves for these games all season. We face such a high level of competition every weekend that anything after that is really pretty easy.”

Pressure? If the Tigers feel any as they make a run at their sixth national crown, it wasn’t showing Sunday.

Reaching this level has been a season-long quest for LSU from the time the preseason polls came out and two had the Tigers on top.
With a ton of experience returning form a 2008 CWS team, LSU was anointed a frontrunner for the national championship before a pitch was thrown, and the Tigers have steered through the season with very few hiccups.

They tied for the SEC regular-season championship and stormed back for the league tournament title with five wins in a row after a loss.

LSU is on a season-best 13-game winning streak as the best-of-three series begins and has lost consecutive games only once all season.