McLeod coach Darien Dukes credits extra hitting drills for his team’s success at the plate in Friday’s 12-4 rout of Overton in the opener of their best-of-three Region III-A quarterfinals series at Texas High’s Tiger Field.

“We’ve been working the last couple of weeks on staying down and through the baseball and staying on the ball,” Dukes said after the Longhorns cranked out 12 hits, including a pair of home runs, against Overton ace Telvin Darden. “We went through a stage where we were pulling off the baseball, and we started doing a bunch of drills and have actually started putt...