Lynchburg baseball players and coaches knew they belonged in Iowa.
That they that hadn’t ever made the NCAA Division III championship tournament — much less the title series — before didn’t matter. That no other team from Virginia had been able to capture the crown wasn’t on their mind. And that Johns Hopkins had forced Game 3 on Thursday in a best-of-three series in Cedar Rapids, stealing momentum away from UL and putting the Hornets on their heels, didn’t bother them.
With a national championship on the line, UL was confident. In its dugout, there’s no such thing as a panic button.
“We just kind of knew this was gonna be a fight,” right fielder Jackson Harding said.
He was right.
JHU asserted itself first in the winner-take-all final game of the DIII season. Lynchburg responded, and the Blue Jays used a solo home run to restore their lead.
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That’s when Harding struck with the biggest hit of his career. His three-run double with one out and two strikes against him in the fifth put Lynchburg on top for the first time all game. Senior pitcher Wesley Arrington and the UL defense made that lead stand up.
And the Hornets, for the first time in program history, climbed to the top of the DIII baseball mountain to claim the title of national champion, using as fuel an undying belief — that it wasn’t in Iowa to simply enjoy the scenery, but that it could and would win it all — to clinch the trophy with a 7-6 win.
“Just unreal happiness for the whole group,” said Zack Potts, who was named the championship tournament’s most outstanding player.
His team used solid pitching in crunch time, a handful of defensive highlights and a few timely hits to get the job done, coming back from both an 11-6 loss in Game 2 of the title series and an early deficit in the day’s second game.
In Game 3, Johns Hopkins (48-8) put Lynchburg in a hole for the first time since the Hornets arrived in Iowa for the DIII championship tournament last week. The Blue Jays scored four times against Jack Bachmore — normally the Hornets’ closer, who started Thursday with the top two guys in the rotation, Potts and Brandon Pond, already having appeared twice (with a complete game each) in the tournament.
But then Bachmore settled in, and he and three relievers gave Lynchburg's offense a chance by keeping the hot JHU bats mostly at bay for the remainder of the day.
Bachmore gave up just one more run in the fifth, keeping UL in the game after the offense got big hits from Gavin Collins and Ben Jones during its rally. Harding’s double to the right-center gap in the fifth gave UL a two-run lead, and the next three arms out of the bullpen limited the Blue Jays to just one run over the final four frames.
Logan Tapman and Mason McDowell, a pair of freshmen, combined to pitch from the sixth into the eighth, before UL (48-8) went to Arrington, the third guy in UL’s regular starting rotation.
He got the ball with one out and the bases loaded in the eighth. Arrington gave up a single that scored a run (charged to McDowell), but, with help from the defense, limited the damage. Only one runner touched home on the play, despite JHU sending another.
Carrson Atkins, another grad student, got to the ball in shallow center field quickly and sent it over the infield to the plate. Fellow grad student and catcher Holden Fiedler (3 for 4) tagged the runner out with time to spare.
UL’s lead down to one, 7-6, with two outs, Arrington delivered his best — despite pitching in a different role on just three days’ rest, after going all nine innings in a win Monday.
He blew a pitch past Matthew Cooper, the nation's home runs leader who was 2 for 4 to that point in the game, for a strikeout.
Arrington finished off the ninth in the same way, with a K, to cap a 1-2-3 inning that gave him his first career save and wrapped up the title for UL.
Like the play in the eighth, one other defensive series proved especially important given the final margin.
In the fifth, Bachmore and UL also picked off and caught a runner stealing. The at-bat during which it occurred resulted in a home run, but instead of two runs out of the hit, JHU got just one.
“We’ve maybe successfully executed that in the last five years twice,” Lucas Jones said of the play, laughing about the irony that a national championship game would include such a moment.
A single run ultimately was the difference for Lynchburg, which also used a two-run single from Gavin Collins in the first to pull within 4-2 and Ben Jones’ two-run homer in the second to tie the game.
“Just going around the bases, I was overwhelmed with joy,” Ben Jones said. “I’ve been waiting to run into one for a couple of weeks. Finally did. Glad it went a long way. … Gave me team another chance.”
The solo JHU homer put the Blue Jays back on top, but then Harding delivered the game-winning run for UL.
“We [knew] we could get back in the game. We’ve done it plenty of times before,” said Harding, who returned to provide the difference-making hit one year after an injury ended his senior campaign just eight games in.
He and five grad students and 13 seniors — along with freshmen like Jones and two others in the lineup Thursday, Brandon Garcia and Sean Pokorak — celebrated the fourth overall national title for the school. They joined the women’s soccer program, which won the school’s first NCAA crown in 2014, and the equestrian team, which won back to back NCEA trophies last year and this year.
For the newest addition to the school’s exclusive club, there’s still plenty to process. But a few minutes removed from the final out, the gravity of their accomplishment started setting in.
“We will [now] be able to say,” Lucas Jones, a Lynchburg native, explained as he sat alongside players who’d just carried his alma mater to the country’s biggest stage, “that we are national champs.”