by Vinny Amodeo
In their first playoff appearance since 2003, the College of Saint Rose traveled to Garden City, NY and shocked the top seeded Adelphi Panthers beating them by a score of 4-0.
“This is amazing,” said the head coach of Saint Rose, Kyle Wilkins. “Obviously I know this isn’t the World Series or anything but this school has gone through a lot over the past few years and it hasn’t been a secret, we haven’t been that successful. I knew we had a good team in the beginning of the year, it started off a bit rocky but I knew we were capable of doing this. I was more nervous that we were going to play tight rather than loose, but we talked to them about it and they played loose, not like the moment was too big for us.”
Senior hurler Phillip Zdanowski threw the game of his life, going the distance in a shutout performance, surrendering just eight hits and one walk, while striking out two.
“We’ve played them (Adelphi) three times now,” said Wilkins. “The one game that we won was with a guy very similar to Phil (Zdanowski). Not overwhelming velocity but gets that second pitch over and keeps them guessing all day long…I knew this was a good match-up from the first series that we faced them and Phil has been a battler. He as been here all four years with us, he has shown he can pitch and he has just been a tremendous college pitcher for this program over the last four years. I am just so proud of him and that was the best game I have ever seen him throw.”
The first six innings of Zdanowski’s outing were completely solid, as no runner even had the chance to reach third base. The first inning in which Zdanowski felt any sort of pressure was the seventh when Alex Zykoff drove a double to center field and advanced to third on a groundout by Michael Stack. The Panthers effort was quickly tamed as Zdanowski got the next batter to fly out and end the inning.
The Golden Knights supported Zdanowski on the offensive side as they jumped on the board early and shook up the Panthers confidence. Senior Jonathan Mulford allowed back-to-back hits in the top of the second to score the first run of the day. In the third, three straight hits from Derek Reed, Nick Venier and Tyler Ungerland produced the second run of the game.
A lull in the fourth and fifth innings led to another pair of back-to-back innings in which the Golden Knights were able to drive runners across the plate. In the sixth a double from Alec Caprarella led to a RBI single from Sean Maki. This would be the last run given up by Mulford, as he would exit the game after this inning with a stat line that included six innings, three earned runs, seven hits, one walk and six strikeouts.
In the seventh, junior Matt O’Connor gave up a lead off single to Derek Reed, which led to a throwing error by the third baseman, Brett Malm, and awarded Reed second base. This led to a RBI single off the bat of Tyler Ungerland, which concluded the scoring for Saint Rose on the afternoon and put them up by the score of 4-0.
With this win the Golden Knights have advanced to the next round of double elimination games in the Northeast-10 Conference Championship bracket.
Adelphi’s awaits their fate as they hope to get a bid into the NCAA tournament. They finish the regular season with a record of 25-22.
