The Pleasant Home Lady Eagles are anxious to get to the “meat” of their schedule this season after playing eight games.

Pleasant Home finished its season last year 27-12 and went to the Class 1A state playoffs in Montgomery, where the Lady Eagles suffered a bitter 4-3 loss to Spring Garden in the first round of the losers’ bracket.

This season, the Lady Eagles have been on a hot start, going 7-1 overall and 4-0 in Class 1A, Area 3 play.

“It’s really been kind of a late start for us,” Pleasant Home coach Jimmy Reeves said. “We were supposed to get started real well last weekend at the (Andalusia) tournament before it got rained out. We’ve played some area games with McKenzie and Florala and folks like that, but we really haven’t got into the meat of our schedule yet.”

Reeves said he believes his team has a great chance to succeed this year.

“I’m excited about our chances and I think we’ve got a very good opportunity to be very good this year,” he said. “Our pitching is a big question mark. If our pitching holds up, we should be sound everywhere else.”

Reeves said the reason why the pitching is questionable is due to injuries.

“We’ve had a couple of injuries and we’re trying to get everybody back healthy with their throwing,” he said. “That’s the big thing. We’re trying to get that back to the status quo, or even better than we had it last year.”

Last year, Reeves said the team was “young” in pitching, but this year he feels there is more experience on the mound.

“Gina Davis is our junior pitcher and then we have Brentin Fuller, she’s a sophomore that’s going to be pitching for us and of course, we’ve got Emily Byrd, an eighth grader who had such a great year last year,” Reeves said.

Every team that has a good start every season still needs some improvement in areas.

Reeves said the team needs improvement everywhere.

“I know that our hitting will come around — we just hadn’t seen any real sound pitching yet (from opponents),” Reeves said. “As soon as we start seeing that, we’ll know what our hitters can do.”

Last Saturday at the Andalusia tournament, the Lady Eagles lost to Kinston 2-1 before the games were canceled due to inclement weather.

Reeves said so far the difference between this year and last year is the caliber of opponents the team has played so far.

“At this point last year, we had several real tough games already,” Reeves said. “This year we haven’t. We haven’t played a lot of real strong competition yet.

“Of course, we played Kinston the other day and they beat us,” he said. “We just don’t know where we are right now because we haven’t gotten to the meat of our schedule.”

Reeves said the team goals are to win area and progress on to win the state championship this year.

“The main thing we try to do is to peak late in the year,” he said. “The last few years, if we lost many games — it was at the beginning of the year. So far, this year, we haven’t played anybody to challenge us and that’s about to start. From here on out, every game we play could be a game we lose very easily.”

The Lady Eagles will be hosting Kinston Tuesday at 4 p.m. There will be no junior varsity games.