2021-22 REVIEW: Top 10 moments of the year - No. 4 National attention for baseball's fast start

When coach Shohn Doty began building his Gaston College baseball team, he told potential recruits he was going to form a talented roster that would play a challenging schedule in hopes of receiving a national ranking.

On March 1st, that happened when the www.thejbb.net National Junior College Athletic Association poll ranked the Rhinos No. 8 in the country.

That continued when the NJCAA poll ranked them No. 10 on March 7 and the PBR JUCO poll ranked them No. 7 on March 8.

Gaston College would eventually climb to as high as No. 2 in the www.thejbb.net and PBR JUCO polls and No. 3 in the NJCAA poll. After the Rhinos finished 41-9 overall, they were ranked No. 5 in the final regular season www.thejbb.net and PBR JUCO polls and No. 12 in the final regular season NJCAA poll.

For Doty, the team's 19-0 start and early national ranking made the Rhinos' a target for rival teams - and something no one could've imagine for a first-year program.

"I think the road sweep at Patrick & Henry kind of put the region on notice so to speak," Doty said of a Feb. 19-20 sweep of a team that had finished fourth in the 2021 NJCAA World Series. "After that, our guys could sense that these teams were approaching us a little differently.
"You can talk to guys about that all you want, but when you go from being the start-up team and a feel-good story and, all of a sudden, you're everybody's biggest game on the schedule, it can be a challenge.
"The biggest thing for us was, 'Can we match that energy on a day-to-day basis and not be satisfied?' And our guys did that. Our bench guys were good and we had really good rhythm there offensively for a long time."