On April 13, the Hickory Hawks were 3-7 and their baseball season seemed to be headed nowhere.
But the Hawks turned their season around in a big way, and on Wednesday they beat host Bayside 3-2 to advance to the Class 5 Region A semifinals.
The Hawks, who have won 11 consecutive games since that start, will play Cox on Friday at Indian River High at 5 p.m.
“We just didn’t handle tight situations well early on,” Hickory coach Hank Kraft said. “We graduated seven guys, and six of them played a lot. You’re starting young guys who got talent, but they just don’t know how to close games out or know what it takes to win tough games. We struggled with that early, but we’ve gotten better at that.”
They sure have.
The Hawks (14-7) scored in the second inning when Ben Redding hit a single to left to score Andrew Vinerov.
Bayside answered in the fourth when Ethan Blakeney scored on a throwing error to tie it at 1.
Hickory added two more runs in the sixth. Austin Jones hit an RBI single down the left-field line. And Redding came up big again when he beat out an infield grounder to allow Nick Affatato to score from third.
“Every ball you have to run out because you never know what may happen,” Redding said. “It could be a passed ball. You just got to go your hardest. It was a great feeling running it out.”
Bayside (13-7-1) battled back and scored one run in the sixth. The Marlins had the potential tying run on third with two outs in the bottom of the seventh.
But reliever Wyatt Simmons struck out the final batter looking at a third strike to help the Hawks advance.
“I love the pressure. That’s me,” Simmons said. “It was back and forth. When I got that last pitch, I was like, ‘Now we can celebrate.’ This is huge. We finally put it all together and we’re having fun.”
Redding said seeing the Hawks put together this winning streak has been special.
“It means a lot. Coming into this season, it was a little rough,” said Redding, who finished with two hits and two RBIs. “To see it finally coming together as a team, it’s huge. It’s what we needed.”
Bayside coach Pat Stafford said it was a tough way to see the the season end for a program that had just one winning season in the past 10 years. But he was proud of how his team played this season.
“You hate to see it end, but man, these guys were resilient. They literally took it to the final pitch,” he said. “Hats off to Hickory. They’re a heck of ballclub and Hank does a great job with them. We knew going in that we would have to earn it. We had a shot at the end, but things went in their favor today. That’s baseball.”
Larry Rubama, 757-575-6449, larry.rubama@pilotonline.com Follow @LHRubama on Twitter.
