By Todd Bradley, DCSportsFan.com
Special to MaxPreps.com
For the first two and a half innings of Thursday night’s WCAC championship game, DeMatha and Ireton couldn’t have been more competitive. DeMatha’s Santino Rosanova and Ireton’s Dan Nicoll were pitching incredible games as the score was deadlocked at zero. But in the bottom of the third inning, the Stags’ bats came alive.
Second baseman Brock McCallister singled to left, Daniel Dragos followed with a double down the third base line, Chris Cook hit a sacrifice fly, Nick Rivers reached on a throwing error (scoring Dragos) and Mike Perez singled in the third and final run of the inning. The 3-0 lead was a sign of things to come, as the Stags went on to defeat Ireton 11-3 at Shirley Povich Field.
"Our bats woke up in the later part of the season," Cook said. “We’ve been practicing hard and have continued to work and tonight it paid off.”
The score remained 3-0 until the bottom of the fifth inning when McCallister engineered another DeMatha run. After being hit by a pitch, McCallister moved to second base on a Daniel Dragos sacrifice bunt. Nick Rivers hit another hard ball to third base, and the throw to first base got away as McCallister crossed the plate to extend DeMatha’s lead to four. The bottom of the sixth inning, however, would be a whole other story.
DeMatha (17-10) sent 10 runners to the plate and scored seven runs, including a bases-clearing, three-run triple by Cook and a remarkable 400-foot solo home run by Nick Rivers. For Rivers, who is a two-sport athlete (football and baseball) at DeMatha, his high school career couldn’t have ended any better.
“It was the perfect ending to my career,” Rivers said. “But you have to hand it to Ireton. They are a class act all the way, and they really came out and played a great game.”
DeMatha's Rosanova pitched a complete game, his fourth of the year. Rosanova held Ireton to two hits through the first six innings before the Cardinals scored three in the top of the seventh.
“When Coach [Sean] O’Conner told me that I was going to pitch in the championship game, my emotions went through the roof,” Rosanova said. “I didn’t have the best control tonight, but I was still able to get the job done.”
As for Bishop Ireton (13-13), there was plenty to be proud of. The Cardinals came into the WCAC tournament as the No. 5 seed and beat O’Connell and Paul VI before falling to the Stags. Mike Gallagher, Ireton’s first-year coach, was named the Coach of the Year, and the Cardinals did as well as they did without even one first-team selection. Frankie Zare, a second-team selection, was the only Ireton player who was named to the first, second or third team All-WCAC.
The season doesn’t end for Ireton as the Cardinals are expected to compete in the Virginia Independent Schools Athletic Association (VISAA) next week.
Todd Bradley is the Editor-in-Chief of www.dcsportsfan.com, which covers high school athletics in the Washington, D.C. area. E-mail Todd at editor@dcsportsfan.com.