Southern Miss pitchers, lifelong friends prophetic in Championship Sunday win

In college baseball, it’s near-impossible to make a deep tournament run without a timeless pitching performance in the biggest of moments.

On Championship Sunday, Southern Miss pitchers Niko Mazza and Justin Storm giving one of those all-time performances.

As fate would have it, Mazza and Storm both hailing from Madison, Mississippi, having grown up on the diamond together as childhood best friends and teammates.

In the Sun Belt Tournament title game, Mazza set the table with three scoreless innings, but ran into trouble with one out in the fourth, coughing up a two-run single, at that point giving Louisiana a 2-1 lead over USM.

Storm was first out of the bullpen. As it turns out, he was the only one out of the bullpen, taking the Golden Eagles the rest of the way with eight strikeouts across five-and-two-thirds scoreless innings.

Tanner Hall and Billy Oldham were both options to close out the game if needed, but in a somewhat prophetic shove session, Storm bringing back shades of last year’s Hattiesburg Regional versus LSU when he closed out the final five innings of a game to force the if-necessary title game. Head Coach Scott Berry said, “I had the feeling of that moment against LSU that he gave us last year. I know he has that type of stuff. I know he has that make-up and that mentality to go out there and pound the zone and make hitters beat him, and certainly, that’s exactly what he did. He didn’t want to come out after the eighth inning. He wanted it, and he showed us why he did. He went ahead and closed the book.”

Storm said, “A lot of people don’t know this, but if you look at the roster, we’re both from Madison. We’re actually best friends from age seven to about 13, and we played baseball together starting about seven years old, and so this year – in the past two years – us being together has been awesome. But we’ve been roommates all season on the road, and we’re lying in bed and about to go to sleep and he’s talking and we’re like, Niko has got the ball. We knew that. And he was like, do you think we could win the game, just me and you? And I was like, well, how long you planning on throwing? And he was like, if I went five, could you handle the rest? I was like, we can make that happen. Kind of funny that we had talked about it, and it’s awesome to do it with that guy. We’ve been buddies forever, so it’s really cool to see.”

Together, Mazza and Storm combined to give up just six hits and four walks with 13 Ks.

Categories: Local Sports, Sports