Chris and Jeff Hinckley thought they had a chance to win. Team Oklahoma hadn’t won the Sunbelt Classic since 2004 and he believed their fortunes were going to turn around this year.

Unfortunately for the Hinckleys and the rest of the Oklahoma squad, a mixture of bad luck, bad matchups and good teams prevented them from claiming the 33rd Annual Sunbelt Classic title last week.

The Oklahomans downed Illinois 11-3 in the seventh-place game at Noble Saturday. They finished with a 2-6 record over the five day pool-play tournament.

Through the first four games of the tourney, Oklahoma was anything but stellar. The Oklahomans carried an 0-4 record into Thursday night’s game after a 16-1 thrashing earlier in the day versus Georgia. They knew they needed to beat Team Canada in order to salvage the rest of their tournament.

Oklahoma was able to put a complete game together and defeated Canada 14-3 in five innings at Norman High to round out the day, and get its first win.

“It feels really good after the tough losses we had against Arizona and Illinois,” Moore’s Chris Hinckley said. “This one was kind of good because we can kind of relax and enjoy the win after a tough first four games.”

It was Chris Hinckley’s play in the pivotal third inning that exemplified how much Oklahoma wanted to win. After fouling a pitch off his knee earlier in the game, a gimpy Hinckley forced himself to block out the pain.

“We talked about that,” Coach Darrell Palmer said. “Life sometimes hands you bad apples. But you can still get up and go get what you want. We have a chance to go play for third. And that would be a good thing.”

In the third inning, with two runners on base, Hinckley lined a hit to center field. As he headed into second, the throw from the outfield flew past the cutoff man and Hinckley kept on running for an inside-the-park home run.

“You get injured and yeah, it hurts,” Hinckley said. “But once you are in the game, you just want to perform and help your team out. That was all I was trying to do, just try and get the run across and help my team win.”

Oklahoma scored eight runs in the third, including a two-run homer by Alex Pando.

Matt Mason picked up the win after allowing three runs in five innings.

“It’s pretty big to be the one to get us the first win,” Mason said. “I just threw strikes. Our mindset was we have got to win one. We want to play for third.”

Coming into the tournament, Oklahoma had designs on winning the title. But that soon changed to making it to the third place game. In order for that to have happened they needed to beat Ohio and rival Texas Friday. Neither happened.

Oklahoma went into Friday’s Red River rivalry game reeling, and coming off a 25-1 thumping earlier in the day to Ohio.