Spring Sports Championships Abound in the Midlands
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Midlands baseball Top Ten Final
1. A.C. Flora (25-5)
2. Chapin (19-9)
3. Airport (25-5)
4. River Bluff (22-11)
5. Batesburg-Leesville (19-9)
6. Blythewood (25-5)
7. Swansea (23-7)
8. Gray Collegiate (22-5-1)
9. Cardinal Newman (17-12)
10. Gilbert (18-10-2)
11. Camden (12-18)
Midlands softball Top Ten Final
1. Gray Collegiate (31-0)
2. A.C. Flora (22-6)
3. Lexington (19-7)
4. Airport (14-16)
5. Blythewood (16-7)
6. Batesburg-Leesville (15-6)
7. River Bluff (17-10)
8. Gilbert (14-10)
9. Chapin (11-16)
10. Pelion (10-12)
Midlands Feature - Spring sports championships abound in the Midlands
By WORTHY EVANS
Contributing Writer
Columbia – The Midlands spring season was filled with long playoff runs and state championship appearances in track and field, boys tennis, baseball, softball, and soccer, and lacrosse.
Among the victors, the Gray Collegiate softball team won its third straight state championship and second straight 4A state title.
A.C. Flora’s baseball team bid longtime head coach Andy Hallett farewell with the eighth state championship in his tenure. The Falcons girls soccer team won a clutch 4A state title victory in PKs over Bishop England, and the boys tennis team put its winning streak at 49 games with its second straight 4A crown.
The Chapin girls soccer team overcame two straight years of being runner up to finally claiming a 5A state championship.
The Blythewood girls track and field team won its fourth straight state championship, Cardinal Newman claimed its seventh straight SCISA boys soccer title, while the Heathwood Hall girls won state in Lacrosse.
Baseball
Andy Hallett wanted to close out his final season at A.C. Flora with an eighth state championship. Sure enough, his Falcons gave him that gift.
A.C. Flora took out defending 4A champion Airport 4-0 May 28—one day after beating the Eagles 2-1 in the first game of the best-of-three series—to complete a 2-game sweep and send their beloved head coach of 29 years on his way to take over the program at Midlands STEM Charter School in Winnsboro.
The series wins were the seventh and eighth straight postseason victories for the Falcons, and stretched the team’s winning streak to 17 games.
“This team right here is going to go down in history as one of the greatest ones to wear an A.C. Flora uniform and have created one of the longest winning streaks of my career,” Hallett said. “In 29 years, I’ve never won this many games (in a row) before, and not only do we do it, but we do it to end the season.”
Game one was delayed several days—and then several hours on gameday May 27—because of rain. When play finally started, the Falcons and Eagles battled for 10 innings. Airport scored a run in the first inning, A.C. Flora scored a run in the fourth inning, and all was silent until the Falcons opened the bottom of the 10th inning with pinch hitter Rohan Bremmer’s single. Brennan Fudger went in to pinch run for Bremmer, and he quickly moved to second on Joe Ray’s base hit, and then to third on an infield error.
Logan Price lashed out a walk-off single that drove in Fudger well after midnight.
Starting pitcher Taylor Hernandez gave up an RBI single to Airport’s Ryan Bullis in the first inning. Hernandez shook it off and worked 4 2/3 innings before leaving the mound. Three other pitchers combined to scatter seven hits and strike out 10 Eagles batters.
Game 2 was considerably less tense. Starting pitcher Sam McCutchen worked a complete-game 2-hitter, striking out 10.
The Falcons took a 1-0 lead in the first inning on Roper Wentzky’s RBI single that drove in Charlie Scott. In the third inning Monty Laffite did the same, singling in Tyler Hernandez to make it 2-0. Later in the inning Jack Chetwood scored on a fielder’s choice.
Scott homered in the top of the sixth to make it 4-0.
After McCutcheon struck out Callahan Berry to put the game in the books, the Falcons piled onto the pitcher’s mound to celebrate—one year after Airport did the same when it won its first ever state championship.
“I was proud of our guys,” Airport head coach Casey Bradwell said. “Proud of our guys. There wasn’t a lack of competing. The moment wasn’t too big. We just got beat by a better team right now.” After the award ceremony and taking his last Gatorade shower as a Falcon, an emotional Hallett reflected on his career and the friendships he’s made at the school and in the community.
“It’s been a wonderful ride for me,” Hallett said. “(It was) 29 years ago, a man...took a chance on a guy that had never been a head coach. I told him I was going to build a championship-caliber team and a program.
“He said, ‘How you’re going to do that? We’ve never won here before.’ I told him it would be fundamentals and discipline. In four years, we hoisted our first trophy. And the one thing I’m probably the proudest of is we’ve been relevant for 30 years. We’ve won across three decades.
“Our kids have always bought into my system. I think we coach our rosters really well from speed teams to power teams, we do our philosophy based on what’s in our dugout, not what we believe, and I think our kids are really good at responding to that.
“It is a sad day. Twenty-nine years is a long time if you’re 57 years old. But as the road goes, every road comes to an end, and I’m really proud and happy my road has ended at A.C. Flora.”
At Chapin May 28, the Eagles hoisted their first ever state championship after closing out a 2-0 series sweep of T.L. Hanna.
The Eagles beat the Yellow Jackets 7-3 in Anderson the day before, then closed out the quick series win with a 4-3 victory at Eagles Field.
It was Dell Lever’s first year coaching Chapin, and throughout the season the Eagles won eight of their 23 games by one run.
“It’s kind of how it’s been all year,” said Lever, who became the first Chapin head coach to win a state baseball title. “It always came down to one run near the end whether we won or lost.”
Lever continued, saying the coaching staff really started preaching about a month ago about key moments in games.
“That’s kind of been our mantra up until this point, just moments,” he said. “We never know what moments are going to make or break a game. So, if we can stay calm and just relax in said moment, more often than not, we’re going to be successful and then once we got into this playoff run, our mantra became ‘one more’ – one more pitch, one more play and so forth. If we can just relax and play ‘one more, one more,’ we’re more likely than not going to have a positive ending on the scoreboard.”
Chapin showed its capitalization of moments in the final game of the series.
T.L. Hanna had taken a 2-0 lead in the first inning on Tatum Manning’s RBI single followed by Brayden Stuart’s RBI single.
Felix Flecha Ruiz erased that lead with the first of his two home runs on the evening, a 2-run shot over the rightfield fence.
Ruiz’s second homer, a solo drive that also carried over the fence in right, gave Chapin a 3-2 lead in the fourth inning.
The Eagles made it 4-2 before the close of the fourth on Luke Cromer’s base hit that drove in Mason Reeves.
Reece Oakley singled in Cesar Ochoa with one out in the fifth inning for T.L. Hanna, but Chapin starting pitcher Griff Harper closed out the fifth inning getting Manning to pop out and Stuart to ground out to end the inning.
Harper got the win, and relief pitcher Brewer Haggard pitched 1 2/3 innings for the save.
“(This is) emotional for me,” Ruiz said. “My last high school game. It’s the best feeling ever.”
Softball
With little drama, the Gray Collegiate softball team made a big statement May 29 at the A.C. Flora softball field.
Sophomore Mackenzie Sease’s home runs in the first and second inning helped boost the War Eagles to a 6-0 lead, while junior Peyton Hendrix took the circle for the second time in the best-of-three series to close out a 11-1 victory and secure Gray’s second straight 4A state championship and third straight state title.
Add to that, University of South Carolina signee Aspen Boulware finished off her career with the War Eagles with a solo home run in her final at-bat, the 60th of her career.
“We set a goal this year to go undefeated,” head coach Doug Frye said. “I know that sounds crazy, but we’d take it one game at a time. These girls bought into it and they stayed focused on what we were doing the whole year. It’s amazing, 34-0. It’s incredible.”
The War Eagles beat the Falcons 7-1 in the first game of the series that was disrupted by rain.
Gray held a 3-1 lead going into the fourth inning before the weather forced a suspension Wednesday night. When play resumed Thursday the War Eagles scored two more runs in the fourth inning on Sease’s 2-out double that drove in Wright and Boulware to make it 5-1. Gray scored a run in the fifth inning and another in the sixth, and Hendrix closed out her first complete game this week in the circle by shutting out the Falcons in the seventh. Hendrix scattered six Flora hits and struck out 10.
“It was just staying focused. All the preparation we’ve done before this season, that’s really what our strategy was,” Hendrix said Thursday. “We’ve all worked very hard this season and it’s trusting that process.”
Girls track and field
For the past four years, no 5A Division 1 school has mustered a girls track and field team to match up with Blythewood’s girls team.
The Bengals made that fact plainly evident when they closed out their fourth straight state championship with a first-place 125 points in the 5A Division 1 meet at Spring Valley’s Harry Parone Stadium May 14.
“It means a lot,” Blythewood girls head coach Aleshia Hawkins said. “It just shows that we never back down. Even after the first one we just kept going and we let our younger ones lead the way and they just kept going.”
Bengals senior Hayley Hightower, who heads to Purdue with a track scholarship in the fall, and her sister Peyton, both earned individual gold medals, with Peyton winning the 400-meter dash with a time of 53.32 seconds and Hayley taking gold in the 800 with a time of 2:13.66.
Peyton Hightower was part of the 4x100 team with Jordan Balance, Alexandra Francique and Brooke Bramlett that took first place with a time of 46.35 seconds. She also ran a leg in the 4x400 team that took gold with a time of 3:49.92 and included Hayley Hightower, Francique, and Cailyn Dawson.
With golds in four events that gave the Bengals 40 points, Blythewood got the rest of its points by stacking up high placings in other events.
Girls soccer
The A.C. Flora girls earned their second straight 4A state championship following a 1-1 tie with Bishop England. After two overtime periods, the Falcons won 5-3 on penalty kicks at Memorial Stadium May 22.
Evan Dampier put A.C. Flora on the board with a goal just before intermission. The Bishops scored the tying goal on Sophia DeMarco’s shot in the 76th minute.
When it came to PKs, Charlotte Cline and Ava Delpino scored for Bishop England, and Mary Elizabeth Riddle and Lauren Holloway scored PKs for the Falcons in the first two rounds.
In the third round Dampier made her shot, and Falcons goalkeeper Kennedy Bagley stopped Bishop England’s Liz Brady’s shot.
DeMarco scored the Bishops’ final PK in the fourth round, but A.C. Flora’s Sammi Lawther kicked her shot in, and Rachel Britt’s shot—the Falcons’ fifth in the PK round—clinched the win.
“Early in the season we weren’t sure what we would have,” A.C. Flora head coach Eric Navarro said. “Coming into the season itself, we had a number of starters to replace, and then we had some injuries early on. We replaced a lot of the core of our team early in the season. As players got healthy, you could see the playing time other players were able to get really pay dividends as we got later in the season. We had strong games against Dreher and in the playoffs. You saw that tonight.”
A.C. Flora beat the Bishops 1-0 to win the state championship last year.
While the Falcons played tight with their arch rival Bishop England, the Chapin girls dispensed with the drama.
The Eagles, who finished as state runners-up in the last two years, finally broke through with a 4-0 victory over Eastside for the 5A Division 2 state championship at Memorial Stadium May 23.
Sydney Stoner headed in a corner kick in the 14th minute for the first score, and two minutes later sister Avery Stoner scored to make it 2-0. Just after intermission Avery Stoner scored again, and Liz Kujawa put in the Eagle’s fourth goal in the 56th minute of play to close out the win.
“I am glad these girls get to see the other side and what it means to win a state championship,” Chapin head coach Chad Bridges said. “This has been a three-year run trying to play for the girls who graduated. I am so thankful we got back here and got the gold medal, not the silver. It is very satisfying and so happy for the girls.”
Boys soccer
The Cardinal Newman soccer team wrapped up its seventh straight state championship with a 1-0 victory over Porter Gaud May 9 at Cardinal Newman.
In the 35th minute of play, Quade Wilson fed a shot to Jasper Westfall near the middle of the box. Westfall drove a shot into the back of the net for the game’s only score.
“I think this feels the same way,” Cardinals head coach Will Eudy said after winning his 12th title. “This is a different group of kids, a different team, a different mentality. At the beginning of the year, this group was winning a lot of games 1-0, big games. Then we hit a little rough patch and made some changes. The team adapted to them.”
Boys tennis
A.C. Flora may have lost six seniors from last year’s state championship win, but that didn’t deter the Falcons from returning to the state final—or losing any game, for that matter.
The Falcons breezed past Bishop England 6-0 to repeat as 4A state champions and continued their 49-match winning streak that dates from May 1, 2024. The boys joined the A.C. Flora girls, who won their second state championship last fall, at the top of the 4A heap.
“You never discount BE or any of the schools on the coast,” said Falcons head coach Amy Martin, who has led the boys to five state championships and the girls team to two state titles. “Going into this state finals undefeated was a huge mark, an exclamation point to close it out with one more win. Did I expect a 6-0 sweep, no. Will I take it, absolutely.”
Three of A.C. Flora’s five wins in singles went down as shutouts. Silas Cecchini defeated Dante Nava 6-2, 7-6 at No. 1, Jude Smyth defeated Roland Wier 6-3, 6-4 at No.2, Vijay Sinha defeated Ben Burnette 6-0, 6-0 at No.3, Will Hewitt defeated Ryland Shaw 6-0, 6-0 at No.4, and Will Bryan defeated Kieran Sharpe 6-0, 6-0.
In No.2 doubles, Sam McCormick and Reid Denemark defeated Declan Finley and Andrew Hamilton 6-1, 6-1.
Girls Lacrosse
Heathwood Hall scored three goals in the closing minutes of the first half and went on to defeat Porter Gaud 8-6 May 8 at Heathwood Hall.
Sophia Turner led the team with three goals, and Juliana Angus and Everette Pope scored two goals apiece. Sophia Genovese added a goal.
“I’m really proud of them,” Heathwood Hall acting head coach Kristen Austin said. “I’m super humbled to be able to coach these girls. It’s truly been an honor. They are an amazing group, and it’s truly amazing for us.”
