By Thomas Grant Jr.
Back in the Class 4A final for the second straight year, Airport baseball had to confront two adversaries.
On the field, it was an A.C. Flora team riding a 15-game winning streak. More important, the Falcons were highly motivated to send departing head coach Andy Hallett out a champion for the eighth time.
Once play resumed, the second “opponent” reared its intrusive side. For three straight nights, thunderstorms and rain prevented Game 1 of the Best-of-Three series from taking place at Falcon Field.
“I asked (Hallett) in 29 years, have you seen some of this stuff, because I haven’t,” Airport head coach Craig Bradwell said. “He said ‘It’s like something new every day. We had geese flying around on the field. All the rain delays. Take them out. Bring them in. Put back all the stuff. It was a heck of a week.”
It was close to 10 p.m. Thursday when the Eagles and Falcons finally took the field. They then proceeded to play another three hours before A.C. Flora pulled out a 2-1 victory in 10 innings.
Airport looked to even the series before a packed Eagle Stadium Friday. Instead, its bats which went silent after Rylan Bullis’ RBI single in the first inning of Game 1 stayed that way with A.C. Flora starter Sam McCutcheon.
The righthander struck out 10 batters over seven scoreless innings. This was more than enough to defeat the Eagles 4-0 and dethrone them on their homefield.
“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,” said Hallett, who will become the athletics director and head baseball coach at Midlands STEM Charter School in Winnsboro. “In 29 years, I’ve never won this many games before and not only do we do it, but we do it to end the season.”
Airport finished the season with a 27-8 record. Afterwards, Bradwell spoke nearly 15 minutes with the team to stress the work necessary starting this summer to get back to the championship.
Next year, the Eagles will compete in Class 3A.
“I was just telling them how proud I am that we continued this and built it together,” he said. “And then obviously we talked about the feeling that we felt tonight and how hard we’ve got to work to get back. This isn’t something easy. They don’t give it to you just because you’re suppose to be here.
“You’ve got to go work and that’s something our program is built on and I just wanted to set the standard early. We’re not taking any time off. We’re going to get right back in the weight room and we’re going to work and we’re going to fix the things we need to fix and we’re going to be ready to go next year.”
