Pearland is set to take on Honolulu, Hawaii in a winners bracket Little League World Series game Monday evening.
This will be Southwest's second game in the series and it comes after their first game, an 8-3 Thursday night win over the Mid-Atlantic team from Pennsylvania. The Hawaii team represents the West in the LLWS and is widely regarded as the hottest team in the tournament right now.
Pearland’s Corey Kahn and Kaiden Shelton are coming off a strong performance that included striking out 10 batters. Manager Aaron Cummings will have them ready if needed.
"To get three days off and have someone available to throw 65 pitches in the game we love that, we want to have everyone available as many times as we can," Cummings said. "For us we love our pitching, we haven't given up a lot of runs this summer and there's a lot of good teams here.”
Hawaii is considered to have some strong fire power when it comes to their offense. In it's first game of competition the team scored 11 runs, and 12 runs the next game. Both games were mercy-ruled. Hawaii's Kekoa Payanal leads the team with two homers so far in the Little League World Series.
Hawaii enters the game with a .388 batting average, while Southwest has a .360 batting average.
"That's what we've been doing all summer 13 guys, the bench has been strong," Cummings said. "We believe that we are deep, we are not two or three guys that hit; we believe that we can hit up and down the lineup 1 to 9."
While the team is ready for Monday’s game, they did take some time away from the field to enjoy themselves. The Broaddus family, originally from Texas but who now live in Williamsport, hosted the 11- and 12-year old's in their 102-year old home over the weekend. A pick-up game of pool was played and even a game of baseball in their backyard.
But the real baseball will happen Monday at 6 p.m. CT on ESPN2.
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