LAWRENCE — The mood inside Hoglund Ballpark felt tense Saturday, in the later innings of Kansas baseball’s game against Arkansas.

A highly-anticipated NCAA regional matchup was delivering in all aspects in Lawrence. At first it was Arkansas landing punches, and Kansas that had to counter. And then later it was KU that took control, leaving everyone watching to wonder if Arkansas could counter, too.

But despite the challenges the Razorbacks presented, the Jayhawks (44-16) emerged with a 5-3 victory to secure a chance at winning the NCAA regional on Sunday at 5 p.m. (CT). In a second-straight NCAA tournament appearance, Kansas coach Dan Fitzgerald’s squad has continued to deliver for a fan base that has not lacked energy in the stadium. And while Kansas, the No. 1 seed in this four-team regional, doesn’t know yet if it’ll play No. 2 seed Arkansas or No. 4 seed Northeastern for the regional title, the confidence the Jayhawks can win it should be as high as ever.

How to watch Kansas baseball play for NCAA regional championship

“Another awesome game, awesome college baseball game against a great Arkansas team,” Fitzgerald said. “Unbelievable environment. It’s such an incredible experience to look at it in the micro-level, but then also think about it from 30,000 feet of where we’ve come in four years. The crowd today, I mean, our crowd was absolutely incredible and super proud of these guys. I thought they competed at a super high level and they were poised and they were prepared and, yeah, they just — they loved the moment and that was really fun. Proud of these guys.”

Kansas, which is 2-0 in this regional with wins against Arkansas and Northeastern, saw multiple heroes emerge during this victory against Arkansas. On the mound sophomore Riane Ritter and redshirt junior Boede Rahe were both impressive out of the bullpen, after the Razorbacks started to put some pressure on sophomore Mason Cook. KU junior Tyson LeBlanc had three RBI, including a two-run home run, and junior Augusto Mungarrieta had a solo home run himself.

There’s a level of pressure that Kansas is facing, that it hasn’t yet during a rebuild in Lawrence that Fitzgerald started ahead of the 2023 season. After winning the Big 12 Conference regular season and tournament titles this year, the Jayhawks are continuing to raise the bar for what’s possible at KU. And so far, they haven’t fallen short of heightened expectations.

On Sunday, Kansas will have the chance to win a NCAA regional. Maybe the heroes this time will be junior Mathis Nayral and junior Brady Ballinger, or another member of a team that’s enjoyed the success it’s had this season because of its depth. Regardless, KU will step onto the field knowing it has a chance to make an already special season even that more extraordinary.

Jordan Guskey covers University of Kansas Athletics at The Topeka Capital-Journal. He was the 2022 National Sports Media Association’s sportswriter of the year for the state of Kansas. Contact him at jmguskey@gannett.com or on Twitter at @JordanGuskey.

I love baseball, so it’s safe to assume that I smile whenever I see a ballpark being built. I’m also an advocate of downtown revitalization, so it’s especially pleasing to see a downtown ballpark.

The Town House, once a favorite of mine for plate lunches, is gone in downtown El Dorado. But construction of the baseball stadium is coming along. South Arkansas College, El Dorado’s two-year college, didn’t create its baseball program until 2021. By 2023, the team was playing in the national junior college World Series and attracting players from throughout this rural region of south Arkansas, north Louisiana and east Texas.

Bill Howard Ballpark, at the corner of West Hillsboro Street and South West Avenue, will house the college team once it’s completed later this year. It also will host various tournaments and exhibitions. The city contributed almost $6 million from its economic development tax funds, and Murphy Oil Corp. made a $10 million donation.

The stadium will have synthetic turf, a 30-foot wall in left field, a right-field video board, and a hospitality suite. The facility is being built near the college’s Howard Residence Hall. The Murphy Oil gift is also being used for the school’s first residence hall.

“The college needs to grow,” says Stephanie Tully-Dartez, South Arkansas College president. “Having intercollegiate athletics on our campus has brought new energy and new students. It makes sense to add to our existing athletic facilities as we add to our academic offerings.”

Howard Residence Hall initially will house about 100 students with space for expansion. Tully-Dartez says that area of downtown needs to be beautified to complement what has already been done at the nearby main campus, Murphy Arts District and town square.

“These improvements will help beautify the area and ultimately bring more college students to El Dorado,” she says. “Those students may eventually decide to stay here, accept jobs, have families and contribute to the overall health of the economy.”

Heath Waldrop writes for El Dorado Insider: “The idea behind student housing is to allow for continued enrollment growth by making it more convenient and by offering the kind of college experience students are looking for. At South Arkansas College, the aim is to provide student housing that’s safe and affordable in an atmosphere that’s exciting and beneficial.”

The residence hall will be a two-story building with two students per room, private bathrooms, laundry facilities and common areas.

What’s now South Arkansas College opened in 1992 after then-Gov. Bill Clinton signed legislation merging the El Dorado branch of Southern Arkansas University with Oil Belt Technical College. Oil Belt opened just east of El Dorado in 1967 as Oil Belt Vocational-Technical School. That campus is now home to the South Arkansas College Career Accelerator and the school’s Advanced Manufacturing Training Center.

The training center covers more than 14,000 square feet, including a 4,500-square-foot covered bay. It’s utilized for both credit and noncredit programs with training spaces for welding, process technology, industrial technology, industrial safety, and rail-car and tanker loading.

SAU’s El Dorado branch opened in 1975 as an extension of what was Southern State College in Magnolia. The main El Dorado campus has been used for educational purposes since 1858. A high school building was constructed there in 1905. It was the home of El Dorado Junior College from 1928-42. An adjacent gymnasium was constructed in 1940 by the federal Works Progress Administration.

Tully-Dartez, who grew up in South Carolina, became South Arkansas College’s director of institutional research and effectiveness in 2009. She was vice president for academic affairs from 2021-24, and became the college’s sixth president on July 1, 2024.

As noted in the cover story of today’s Perspective section, El Dorado is different from an average Arkansas city of fewer than 20,000 residents. Even though its population fell from 25,270 in the 1980 census to 17,756 in the 2020 census (the same kind of population losses are occurring across the entire south half of the state), business and civic leaders have worked hard to maintain one of the finest downtowns in the South.

In May 2020, Murphy Oil decided to move its headquarters to Houston. Company officials cited the pandemic, low crude oil prices, and the fact that the oil and gas industry had consolidated operations in Houston. Arkansans took to social media to declare the end of El Dorado. What they didn’t realize is that the big employer in El Dorado is corporate spinoff Murphy USA with between 600 and 700 employees. Murphy USA wasn’t going anywhere.

While the loss of about 80 Murphy Oil employees hurt, it wasn’t catastrophic. It did, however, leave a major downtown building empty. The Murphy Oil headquarters was completed in 2015. The five-story building features a four-story atrium, a 170-seat video conference center, exhibit gallery space, and a data center. It didn’t stay empty for long.

In 2022, First Financial Bank of El Dorado announced it had purchased the structure. First Financial was founded in 1934. It operates loan production offices across the country and is known for specialty lending divisions focused on mortgages, poultry, pharmacy, veterinarians, and farm and ranch operations.

In October 2024, the First Financial board appointed Sean Williams to succeed Chris Hegi as chief executive officer. Williams joined First Financial in late 2019 when it acquired First National Bank of Wynne, where he served as CEO. He has been instrumental in the growth of First Financial’s retail and agricultural markets while also leading the bank’s technological advancements.

Williams greets me in the lobby of the headquarters building. He’s like a boy showing off Christmas gifts as we walk through the 87,000-square-foot structure. There are 16 conference rooms. About 125 people work in the building.

“We have a lot of specialty teams, and this building allows us to put the right people together,” Williams says. “We’re among the leading lenders in the country to the poultry industry, for example. Those folks need to be together. There’s a farm and ranch division, a pet division and a team that serves pharmacies. We have loans in all 50 states.

“The purchase of this building represented a commitment to El Dorado and to the future of our bank. We plan to grow as a bank, and we want El Dorado to grow. I’m from McCrory in east Arkansas. I had never even visited El Dorado until I was an adult. It didn’t take me long to realize that there are great people here.

“The amenities El Dorado offers makes it easy for us to recruit people to work for the bank. And it would be safe to say the purchase of this building was a game changer from a recruiting standpoint.”

First Financial previously had its headquarters in one of the state’s most historic buildings, the nine-story Lion Oil building. Built in 1926-27 during the oil boom, the structure was designed to send a message to the rest of the country that El Dorado had arrived as a place to do business. It was designed by the Little Rock architectural firm Mann & Stern in an eclectic mix of Venetian-inspired styles. The building, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986, also housed Exchange Bank at one time.

First Financial purchased the building in 1997. The company made extensive renovations, including a 2017 expansion of the retail bank branch. Bank officials felt it was important not to leave an iconic structure empty. They found a buyer in Diversified Construction & Design. Diversified, which was founded in 2015, is a full-service general contractor and regional provider of industrial, commercial and residential services. It has architectural, civil, equipment and mechanical divisions.

Rex Nelson is a senior editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Last year Kansas and Arkansas were in the Fayetteville Regional but never got a chance to play. That will change tonight at 5 p.m. when the top two seeds face off in the winner’s bracket of the Lawrence Regional.

Arkansas head coach Dave Van Horn watched the Jayhawks last year and believes they are a better team than last year.

“They are a very good team,” Van Horn said. “They were in our regional last year. We didn’t face them, but you could see from the stands or our offices when we watched them play that they’re physical.

He continued:

“They added to it, got a couple key guys back, and they can hit the ball over your head with the best of them. Really good here (at home). They had one rough weekend here against West Virginia. Other than that, they’ve been great.”

Kansas will face a talented pitcher in Dietz

The Jayhawks are set to face one of the best pitchers they have seen this season. Hunter Dietz is expected to start for the Razorbacks and should be healthy.

In the SEC tournament against Texas, he took a line drive off his leg that sidelined him. He threw a bullpen earlier in the week and looked good according to Arkansas head coach Dave Van Horn.

“That’s the plan, is to pitch him,” Van Horn said. “Unless something crazy goes on with his leg or whatever. But yeah, he seems to be feeling good. He seems to be moving around good and no complaints. I feel like he’s ready to go, so that’s who we’ll go with.”

[Jayhawks open with a win over Northeastern]

Dietz is projected to go in the first round and some draft analysts say he might be the best left-handed pitcher in the country. The 6-foot-6 lefty’s fastball is consistently in the 93-96 mph range and he mixes in a cutter and slider.

This year he has eye-opening numbers with 121 strikeouts and only 29 walks.

Containing the running game from Northeastern

A lot of the talk going into the first round against Northeastern was their speed on the bases. They led the nation in stolen bases by a wide margin but did not get one against Kansas.

“It was the emphasis going in,” said head coach Dan Fitzgerald. “Now, the Big 12 prepares us for that. You think of the teams that we play against, you’ve heard me refer to the Big 12 as the take-what-they-give-you league.”

Fitzgerald gave credit to his coaching staff working with the pitchers on their delivery and holding runners on.

“It took a lot of game planning,” Fitzgerald said. “I thought that Coach Scott and Coach Holland did a tremendous job today. I thought the scout was amazing, but that was a big deal to hold them down.”

Kansas will have a rested bullpen

One good thing going into the Arkansas game is a rested bullpen. Dominic Voegele threw seven innings on 102 pitches and was followed by Boede Rahe who threw 32 over two innings of work.

Fitzgerald said after the game it was a key factor to get through game one with two pitchers.

“It was huge, and they were both fantastic,” he said. “Boede has told me daily the entire season that he’s good to go, so he’ll be able to bounce back. Dom was so efficient, and again, it’s so hard to be efficient against a lineup like that.”

Rahe leads the team in saves and he has appeared in back-to-back games this season. If he is needed in a close game tonight don’t be surprised to see him available for a limited pitch count.