Alabama baseball has a quick turnaround in its upcoming 12 hours. The team will retreat to its hotel near Tallahassee, Fla., knock out a team dinner, “get hydrated.” Then, at 9:30 a.m. central time Saturday, the Tide will be back in Dick Howser Stadium for batting practice. First pitch with its season on the line will come an hour after that.

Such is the gauntlet following UA’s opening NCAA tournament regional loss to UCF, 8-7. The Tide rallied offensively and scored all of its runs with two outs, but multiple late bullpen gaffes sent UA into the losing portion of the bracket. Ben Hess will take the mound tomorrow against Stetson in a lose-or-go-home qualifier.

“It’s a little bit of a dangerous lineup,” first-year Alabama coach Rob Vaughn said of Stetson, who lost to host team Florida State earlier on Friday. “They get after it a little bit, they’ve thrown the ball really well. I think they’re top 75 in the country in ERA. The big thing for these guys is to go get in bed and us coaches to stay up and go put a good game plan together.

“At the end of the day, you have to bite this thing up, chop it up into bite-size pieces and the first piece of that is Stetson tomorrow.”

UCF had one more hit with a runner in scoring position (4 to 3) and had seven runners reach base via walk compared to UA’s two.

Justin Lebron, who led Alabama with four hits and two RBI, said: “I definitely do think that they attacked us. Didn’t really give up too many walks for free, maybe a couple. Really went at us.”

Added Vaughn: “For me, that’s the lineup we’ve ran out there with lefties all year long so no adjustment there. I think I can count, shoot, on one hand the amount of times we broke our swings down on the changeup. … TJ (McCant)’s last ball was hammered to left field, two hours earlier that’s a homer. But the wind dies down a little bit at night and it gets caught at the wall. That’s baseball.

“We hit a couple homers with two outs. We fought like heck. … I thought we competed with two outs really well. but again just came up one short.”