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While the Prairie Baseball Academy Dawgs earned their seventh consecutive Canadian College Baseball Conference championship on Sunday, it again took late-game heroics at Kelowna’s Elks Stadium to do it.
Twice in Sunday’s championship finale with the Thompson Rivers University WolfPack of Kamloops, the Dawgs had to come from behind to secure their unprecedented achievement — finally defending their CCBC crown with a 4-3 extra-innings victory.
The Dawgs, 5-4 winners over the Okanagan College Coyotes in last year’s championship game when they scored two runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning, this time needed a run in the bottom of the 10th to tie the WolfPack and added the winning run in the 11th inning.
With two out, Carter Witbeck’s single scored Dylan Flasch from second base to earn the repeat victory for the Lethbridge-based Dawgs. Flasch had reached first on an error by WolfPack shortstop Blayne Halland and stole second to set up the winning combination.
The Dawgs, first-place finishers in the six-team championship tournament with a 3-1 record after claiming the regular-season pennant with a 21-3 mark, had opened the scoring with two runs in the first inning, but gave up two to TRU in the third. Both teams were held scoreless until the top of the 10th when Halland hit a double to drive in Josh Hillis, who had reached first with a single and took second on a PBA error in centre field.
The Dawgs had earned their berth in the final by defeating the newly-formed University of the Fraser Valley Cascades 6-0 in semifinal play while the WolfPack got to the final by upsetting the host OC Coyotes 6-2 in their semi earlier on Sunday.
Although the Coyotes had defeated the Pack in six of eight games during the regular season, they couldn’t continue the trend in the championship tournament where they finished 3-2 overall.
TRU scored three runs in both the fourth and seventh innings to secure the win despite being outhit 8-5 by the Coyotes, the only team to defeat PBA in the five-day tournament (6-3 in round-robin play).
Erik Junnola, with a pair of hits, including a run-scoring single, led OC at the plate, while the other six hits were spread out among six players. Davis Todosichuk of Kelowna was the lone Coyote to slash an extra-base hit (double) to finish the year-end tournament with a .455 average (10-for-22).
Meanwhile, starting rookie Aiden Mordecai took the loss on the hill, giving up three earned runs and three walks in the first four innings. Zac Yandeau pitched 2 1/3 innings, and while allowing three more runs, none of them were earned. The final two innings saw Trevor Brigden hold the WolfPack scoreless.
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