Seamless on the diamond: UNCP wins Conference Carolinas Tournament championship

GASTONIA — On the field, things went abundantly well for The University of North Carolina at Pembroke baseball team throughout the Conference Carolinas Tournament.

It may have been off the field, in fact, where the Braves had to most show their resilience.

“We’ve been dealing with adversity all week; we’ve had buses break down, we’ve had A.C. go out (on the bus), we’ve had ants in the rooms, we’ve had to move around a lot,” Braves senior Spencer Faulkner said. “I told the guys, when we get to the field just to have fun, because we’ve had a lot of adversity. So when we get to the field, we were just playing like we were little kids in the backyard or at a travel ball tournament. We were just playing, not really thinking about much. We were just having each other’s back, playing to the best of our ability and really trusting our preparation throughout this process.”

But in a week that UNCP coach Paul O’Neil said “a lot of things … didn’t go very smooth,” the on-diamond results were practically seamless. The Braves won all four of their tournament games, winning the championship with a 10-0, seven-inning victory over Belmont Abbey on Monday.

“These kids, they set a goal at the beginning of the year in August, and this was one of their goals that they wanted to achieve,” O’Neal said. “It’s great for them to see their dream, or their goal, to come true. They obtained their goal, and that’s really special any time you can set a goal for yourself and obtain it; it validates all your hard work that you’ve put into it.”

UNCP (42-12) won its first Conference Carolinas Tournament championship in history, after playing in the league from 1976-92 and rejoining it in 2021. The Braves’ last conference tournament title overall came in 2011 in the Peach Belt Conference.

The fourth-seeded Braves trailed for only one half-inning in four tournament games; the run included 5-4 wins in Thursday’s tournament opener against Emmanuel and Sunday’s game against Belmont Abbey, which sent the Braves into the tournament final, but also a 9-3 win over Erskine on Friday and Monday’s 10-0 win over Belmont Abbey.

“The guys played really good baseball,” O’Neil said. “We pitched really well, our offense was really good and our defense was good, and if you put all three of those phases together, most of the time you’re going to win more than you lose.”

Needing one win for the title on Monday, while opponent Belmont Abbey had to beat the Braves twice in the double-elimination format, UNCP opened the scoring quickly in the championship round as Joey Rezek hit a two-run home run to the opposite field in the first inning.

“I knew playing Belmont Abbey a couple times, they were going to feed me soft away, so they were giving me a lot of changeups the day before, so I knew I had to be mature about my at-bat and I had to look for something I could handle, so I was sitting on a changeup looking for something away,” Rezek said. “They went changeup, and I just trusted myself and took it the other way. And it’s 304 (feet) down the line, so sometimes it goes your way with the field, so I was able to get two runs in early and I think it got the boys fired up.”

Michael Dolberry II and Rezek drove in third-inning runs for UNCP with back-to-back RBI doubles, then Faulkner put the finishing touches on a four-run inning with a two-run blast that gave the Braves a 6-0 advantage.

“I told the guys today that we had to work counts, because we knew they were low on arms. So if we could work their pitchers and make them throw a lot of pitches, we were probably going to be successful in the game,” Faulkner said. “Got 3-2, they were spinning it well, I knew I was probably going to get slider, cutter, so I was trying to see spin up and not chase, and he hung me a slider, and delivered right there. … Putting four, five hits together right there in that inning just kind of took the air out of their balloon, and really propelled us to say, hey, we can do this, we know we can do this, let’s go ahead and seal this deal and win this thing.”

“Anytime you can get out in front, that’s better than being down,” O’Neil said. “We got out in front, and everybody could kind of exhale a little bit and just kind of play, and then we scored again, and we scored a couple runs, and H.L. (Smith) settled in and threw the ball well, and when he kind of ran out of gas Kasen (McCawley) came in and got a huge out.”

Indeed, Smith (3-2) went 4 2/3 shutout innings for the Braves, allowing four hits with one walk and seven strikeouts, earning the win; McCawley relieved Smith in the fifth, inducing a flyout to escape a bases-loaded jam, and ultimately worked the final 2 1/3 innings without allowing a hit and was credited with his first save of the season.

Rezek drove in two more Braves runs, his fourth and fifth of the game, in the fourth inning to extend the UNCP lead to 8-0. A two-RBI single by Will Hood in the seventh stretched the lead to 10-0, bringing the Braves to the threshold of a 10-run lead to end the game early once Belmont Abbey (28-25) was held scoreless in the bottom half, sparking a black-and-gold dogpile at the center of the diamond.

Rezek totaled four hits, three runs and five RBIs in the championship game, with seven hits and seven RBIs in the tournament, to earn Most Outstanding Player honors.

“It’s exciting to have it in a championship game, but I wouldn’t be able to get those five RBIs without the guys in front of me getting on base. … When they do their jobs it helps me do what I’m supposed to do, and we get runs off of that, which is huge in a championship game,” Rezek said. “I didn’t know what to expect, who was going to get (Most Outstanding Player). Kody O’Connor had a great tournament, we had some pitchers that did outstanding and Mike Dolberry is still swinging the bat.”

O’Connor, Andrew Jenner, Chase Jernigan and Jonathon Jacobs also earned All-Tournament selections for UNCP.

The title is especially meaningful for fifth-year seniors Faulker and Jernigan, who previously won a conference championship when the Braves won a Peach Belt regular-season title in 2021, and are now the team leaders on the program’s next title-winning club.

“It just shows how much we’ve put in the work through the last five years that I’ve been here,” Faulkner said. “We’ve been a very resilient group, very blue-collar, tough, hard-nosed, and we’re starting to reap the benefits of the work we’ve put in over these years. So it’s very good to see the guys get a championship and win this tournament for the first time in Conference Carolinas, and I’m excited for where it’s going to take us down this dance in the postseason.”

“To see how their game has exponentially increased year after year after year — they’re the main guys in our program, they’re the guys that are always at the forefront of everything,” O’Neil said. “It’s extremely rewarding to see where their game came from to where it is now, and to see how they handle themselves in a pressure situation. Everybody should get a chance to experience that; it’s very special.”

While UNCP would have likely earned an at-large bid to the NCAA Southeast Regional, the Braves’ fate no longer rests in the selection committee’s hands after earning the automatic bid that comes with winning the conference tournament. The field will be announced by the NCAA on Sunday, with regionals held the following weekend.

The Braves enter the NCAA Tournament as one of the hottest teams anywhere, having won nine straight games, 13 of their last 14 and 21 of their last 24 — and looking to continue that momentum and make more history.

“I’m really proud of their effort level,” O’Neil said. “Throughout the season, we had our highs and our lows, and we definitely had some lows in the season, and they were resilient and they bounced back and they came together and they played really hard and they played for each other, and they picked each other up when they didn’t have a good day, and they didn’t get too full of themselves when they had a great day. That’s what’s carried us through this last part — we’ve been playing very good baseball in the month of April.”