DENVER – All MSU Denver has to do in the RMAC baseball tournament this weekend is turn around a difficult finish to the regular season and beat all comers, including a pair of nationally ranked teams.
 
Stranger things have happened.
 
"There's a weird vibe to conference tournaments," said Metropolitan State University of Denver coach Ryan Strain, who is in his 14^th season of collegiate coaching. "I've seen teams who are struggling get in it and win it. We've had good practices the last couple of weeks. But you've got to go out and perform. We've had some key injuries to deal with, but we've lost some confidence as a team."
 
The Roadrunners (27-22 overall) wound up the tournament's fifth seed after losing their final eight Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference games, and 11 of their last 12 league conference contests, in compiling a 19-17 league mark.

They'll play second-seeded Colorado School of Mines (36-11, 27-9), ranked No. 29 nationally, in a 7 p.m. first-round game Wednesday at the six-team double-elimination tournament, which is hosted by top-ranked (by Collegiate Baseball) Colorado Mesa. Mines swept the Roadrunners in a four-game series last weekend.
 
How will the Roadrunners get their mojo back? One way includes a meeting with the program's performance coach on Tuesday.
 
"It's not physical in a lot of cases," Strain said. "In baseball, you have to protect your confidence at all costs, no matter what. It's similar to being a golfer. Once you start to doubt, even an inkling, you're not going to have success. Because there's way too much time to think and the game is way too hard.
 
"We just want to have trust and go back to doing what we did when we were playing well."
 
The Roadrunners were a juggernaut early in the season, winning a school-record 14 consecutive games. Then came the end-of-year struggles.
 
All that, good and bad, is in the past now.
 
"It's a new season," Strain said. "None of the runs they scored last weekend count. Nothing we did poorly – or that we did well – counts. It's all brand new."
 
Besides getting the mental mojo back, there are some physical feats that also need to be carried out.
 
"Obviously we have to get better starts," Strain said of his starting pitching. "We've been down right away in almost every game (recently). We have to get some momentum that way. And offensively, we've just got to do a good job of getting guys on base early in innings. We've been getting hits with two outs and nobody on, then we get runners in scoring position, but we can't do too much with it because there's already two outs."
 
Get all that turned around and, as is always the case with baseball, you never know.