WOODVILLE — Wilkinson County Christian Academy baseball coach Ken Perry wasn’t too pleased with his team’s performance on Tuesday night. Yet, he wasn’t mad either.

“We played good,” Perry said. “But we played bad as well. We are a young team. We weren’t expected to be this far, but we are.”

The place the Rams didn’t expect to be is the second round of MAIS Class A playoffs in Game 1 of a three game series against Claiborne Academy. However, WCCA did not fare well in the first contest of the match-up, as it lost 20-7 in five innings.

While the score may seem like the Rams were run off the baseball diamond by the Rebels, WCCA put up a good fight against Claiborne Academy for four innings.

In the first half inning of the contest, Rams’ starting pitcher Kaleb Crum allowed six runs. Yet, WCCA responded with four runs of its own in the bottom of the first to cut the lead to two — which was the tale of the game. Claiborne Academy would build its lead, but the Rams responded by cutting the deficit to one or two runs.

“We don’t give up,” Perry said. “It don’t matter what the score is. And we came back a couple times.

“We just came back and stayed competitive. We just stayed close, but we just couldn’t get over that hump.”

Perry said the reason the Rams couldn’t get over the hump was because of the errors they made.

WCCA had fielding errors by every infielder, multiple throwing errors and even base running errors — which Perry said cost the Rams some runs.

While the errors did WCCA in, so did its defense.

“We have to play better defense,” Perry said. “That really gave (Claiborne Academy) a lot of their early runs. We just have to play better defense. Just the little things. It’s the little things that the young guys are still learning to do.”

This year, the Rams have played countless freshmen and eighth-graders.

With the loss, WCCA now faces a win-or-go-home game at 4 p.m. on Thursday when it travels to Claiborne Academy. And Perry said it’s going to be hard to even the series, yet he believes his team can do just that.

“I am trying to instill in the guys to play one game at a time,” Perry said. “Just get that first one down. Then we will focus on the next one. It’s going to be tough because four hours is a long way … if we play defense, we can compete. Claiborne Academy is going to be fired up because all the yneed is one more win. So we have to take that momentum away from them, and I believe we are capable of doing that.”