Texas reliever Jared Southard returns to Rouse to help rejuvenate season

Jared Southard turned around his season thanks in part to a frost blue Gatorade.

Not long after Rouse, his high school team, was eliminated from the playoffs in early May, the Texas relief pitcher went back to talk with the team he had a hand in making a perennial power.

Instead of talking about any struggles he might be having with the Longhorns, they gave him blue Gatorade that seemly had supernatural powers and asked if he’d keep coming back.

“I was having a tough time mentally with some things,” Southard said. “I went back and saw the kids there. They kind of gave me some hope. Just seeing those kids kind of look up to me, that’s kind of what changed.

“I only drink blue Gatorade now.”

Since May 10, Southard has allowed just three hits and zero runs in 10.1 innings, including a career-high six strikeouts in a season-high three innings in Sunday’s win over Air Force to clinch the Austin Regional.

“(Jared) can get fired up,” Rouse head coach Chad Krempin said. “He was more explicit than I wanted him to be, but I think he enjoyed being around the kids, and they look up to him. He’s superman to some of these guys.”

Southard was selected in the 20th round by the Los Angeles Angels in the 2019 MLB draft but elected to stay committed to the Longhorns.

He made just three appearances and pitched 2.1 innings in the COVID-shortened 2020 season, and pitched 10 innings across 12 appearances with 16 strikeouts and seven walks without allowing a run in 2021.

This season, Southard has 42 strikeouts and 18 walks in more than 25 innings. He earned the win Sunday against the Falcons, his fourth of the season.

“He’s been growing and growing,” Texas head coach David Pierce said. “We respect him so much because he puts in the work and he’s been around the ballpark. It’s been a long process for him. I still don’t know if he’s there yet as far as the consistency, but he works at it so hard.”

Pierce said Southard would talk about how he could personally improve delivery and his stuff, but it took a conversation with him to start focusing on his teammates.

Since then, Pierce said Southard has been setting up batting practice by himself for over a year now. After pitching three innings against Air Force, he was running sprints alone in the outfield until midnight.

“He has become the ultimate teammate, and there’s not one player on that team that doesn’t pull for him because of all the things he does for them,” Pierce said. “I see maturity and being very selfless and being concerned about his team.”

Southard has always been focused on improving.

When it gets to the point that he’s being a little too hard on himself, whether it’s Pierce at Texas, Krempin at Rouse or his teammates on the Longhorns or former teammates with the Raiders are there to offer encouragement.

“I’ve always been committed at Texas,” Southard said. “My coaches and teammates and friends have always had my back.”

That’s part of the culture Krempin has built at Rouse.

The year before he was hired in 2018, the Rouse baseball program was coming off a season in which the Raiders failed to win a district game and finished the season on a 14-game losing streak.

Since then, Rouse has won two district titles, made the playoffs every year they’ve been held and made it to the state tournament for the first time in school history last season.

Southard is one of a long list of players now in college that helped Krempin turn around the program, including Dalton Porter (Texas Tech), Hayden Thomas (Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) and Cody Vannoy (Tarleton State), and could go on even longer.

“A lot of our college guys come back, and I take as much pride in that as anything,” Krempin said. “All those guys mean a lot to our program. It’s important to our guys to see that in the past, that didn’t happen much, now we’ve got all these guys that play and go on to the next level. It’s hope for them that they can do that.”

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Original Article: https://www.hillcountrynews.com/stories/texas-reliever-jared-southard-returns-to-rouse-to-help-rejuvenate-season,95959?