When Clifton Central and St. Anne/Donovan met Saturday morning for the Class 1A Clifton Central Regional championship, all indications led to the game being a nail-biter.
The RVC squads split their regular season conference series with both teams winning at home by four runs.
Only two runs were needed on Saturday for the Comets to win their first regional since 2019 and first in Class 1A with a 2-0 win over the Cardinals.
“It feels great, not having done it in seven years,” Clifton Central’s Derek Meier said. “So it feels good to get our name out there [with the other great Central teams].”
The Comets improved to 21-7 overall and will head to the Dwight Sectional on Wednesday to play Gibson City-Melvin-Sibley in the semifinals at 2 p.m. The Cardinals conclude their season at 11-12 overall.
After both team’s starting pitchers – Clifton Central’s Blake Chandler and St. Anne/Donovan’s Preston Harrington-Dewitt – worked around traffic on the base paths in the game’s first two innings, the Comets struck in the following two innings.
An RBI single up the middle by Reece Boudreau scored Meier in the third and an RBI sacrifice fly by Chandler scored Griffin Parks in the fourth to manufacture the game’s only two runs, although Chandler only needed one.
“That’s all I needed to feel confident to shut them down,” Chandler said. “I asked for one run and they gave it to me.”
After four innings of shutout ball and six strikeouts from Chandler, the Comets turned to Brayden Meents to close the game for Clifton Central – and he delivered. Meents allowed just one hit in his three innings of work with three strikeouts to earn the save and Clifton Central a regional championship.
“I don’t think they’ll understand this in the moment, but we talked about going into the season that there’s some things they can’t take away when you graduate,” Clifton Central head coach Brian Kohn said. “A plaque like this is going to be up on the wall, these guys are going to be around, we’re going to be around.”
For St. Anne/Donovan, the Cardinals just were not able to execute offensively, leaving nine runners on base while only mustering three hits with six walks. And while they leave their third regional championship appearance in four years without any hardware to show, the culture is shifting around a program that was once an afterthought in the schools and communities but has won double-digit games for the fourth consecutive year.
“When I came here, I was told by community members like ‘yeah we’d be fine having five wins’, and we ended up winning 13 [games],” St. Anne/Donovan coach Ike Speiser said. “It’s definitely something that you can sit back and be proud of, but we are still not satisfied.
“We want to go get that regional championship, win the RVC, and we’ve fallen short of that. I feel like we can continue to go down this path year in and year out, stay committed, and just execute.”