Senior leftfielder Ross Brezovsky will have the chance to play a dozen 2007 regular-season games in his home state of Florida.

Notre Dame Releases 2008 Baseball Schedule

Nov. 20, 2007

The Notre Dame baseball team’s 2008 schedule, recently finalized and approved for release, will include early-season trips to Florida and Texas along with BIG EAST road series at South Florida, West Virginia, Connecticut, Villanova and Georgetown. The slate also features the annual game with Michigan in Grand Rapids, a matchup with IPFW at Fort Wayne’s minor-league Memorial Stadium – and a bonus midseason exhibition game versus the South Bend Silverhawks, at downtown Coveleski Stadium.

Notre Dame’s four BIG EAST home series will include games versus St. John’s, Rutgers, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati while the midweek games at Alumni Field again will feature some of Notre Dame’s traditional non-conference rivals, most notably Central Michigan and Ball State.

See the schedule link on the baseball page (also included below) for the full 56-game listing (also check back later to und.com for a PDF version of the ’08 schedule).

http://und.cstv.com/sports/m-basebl/sched/nd-m-basebl-sched.html

Notre Dame will open the 2008 season by playing in Clearwater, Fla., for the third straight year. The team’s four Clearwater Invitational games at Jack Russell Stadium (Feb. 2-24) will include two versus a University of Albany team that advanced to the 2007 NCAA Tournament. The Irish then will return to Florida the next week to participate in the Papa John’s Challenge, a multiple-field tournament that will be held primarily at the Santaluces Sports Center. Notre Dame will face four challenging games from northeast foes during that first stage of Spring Break (March 1-5), with the first game to be played versus Boston College in Delray Beach (followed by four games in West Palm Beach),

The split Spring Break schedule will end in Corpus Christi, Texas, at the Whataburger Classic. That tournament (March 7-9) will be held at Whataburger Field, the home of the double-A Corpus Christi Hooks (a Houston Astros affiliate), with Notre Dame’s three games at that event headlined by matchups with South Alabama (a perennial contender for the NCAAs) and Arizona, a 2007 NCAA participant.

Notre Dame then will return to the familiar surroundings of San Antonio the weekend after Spring Break (March 14-16), for three games at Wolff Stadium (including renewal of the rivalry with Southern Illinois).

Each of the 12 BIG EAST baseball teams again is scheduled to play nine others in three-game series (Notre Dame will not face Louisville or Seton Hall in the ’08 regular season). All but two of the series involving Notre Dame will be three-day series, with nine-inning doubleheaders scheduled for the first day of the two-day series versus Villanova (April 12-13) and Pittsburgh (May 10-11). Fans are reminded that the road series versus Villanova (Plymouth Meeting, Pa./Villanova Ballpark) and Georgetown (Bethesda, Md./Povich Field; March 20-22) are played at off-campus venues.

In addition to those games mentioned above, dates for Notre Dame’s other BIG EAST road series include April 18-20 at West Virginia, May 2-4 at Connecticut and May 15-17 at South Florida. The other BIG EAST home series are March 28-30 vs. Cincinnati, April 4-6 vs. Rutgers and April 25-27 vs. St. John’s.

Notre Dame and Michigan again are scheduled to play at Fifth/Third Bank Ballpark in Comstock Park, Mich. (just outside of Grand Rapids), marking the 13th “Baseball Bash” meeting between the teams in the past 14 seasons.

The BIG EAST Tournament again will be played under the newer eight-team format from May 20-24, at a site that is TBA. The format will mirror the College World Series with two four-team brackets playing double-elimination games on the first four days. The bracket winners then will meet in a single title game on May 24.

The NCAA tournament regionals are set for May 30-June 2 and the super-regionals on June 6-9 (both at campus sites) while the College World Series will be June 14-25 at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Neb.