Champs! Underdog Lisle Baseball Wins First 2A State TItle

We can say it for the first time ever: state champions Lisle Lions baseball!

With massive upset victories over two heavily favored opponents—a 2-1 edging over Teutopolis High School, followed by a 10-1 blowout of Pleasant Plains High School—the Lions (23-10-1) finished their season on the best imaginable note over the weekend in Peoria, claiming the Illinois 2A hardball state title.

“I can’t describe this in words,” title game-winning pitcher Alex Ventrella told the Bugle. “This is one of the greatest stories in sports. What are we, like 5,000th in the nation? I don’t even know what our Illinois ranking is. We weren’t even supposed to win regionals. This is just amazing. I can’t even put this into words right now.”

Indeed, the Lions were never favored to go anywhere near this far, but kept winning gritting one-run games throughout the postseason—when they weren’t blowing opponents out of the water.

"I told the guys they beat two storied programs: they beat the best," Lisle coach Pete Meyer told the Daily Herald. "We came here with the goal of playing as good as we could play and playing the right way. At a certain point you just say, 'Why not us? Why can't we do it?' It's just an amazing achievement by these guys."

According to the Suburban Life, versus title favorite Teutopolis on Friday in the semifinal, pitcher Ryan Van Volkenburg held the Wooden Shoes to a single run in a complete-game effort while Ventrella went 2-for-3, knocking in one run and scoring the other on a Kevin Coppin hit, both in the third inning. Van Volkenberg may have saved the tying run with a sixth-inning pickoff, the Herald said.

Then, the Suburban Life said, the Lions lit up a Pleasant Plains team that was also supposedly favored to crush them, putting up six runs on seven hits in the first inning to knock out a Cardinals starter after just 0.2 innings, with two RBIs from Coppin and two more from Bailey Welch.

According to the Herald, Brian Czyl added two hits and two runs, Jake Oard two RBIs, and Adam Grego and Jordan Herman a hit, run and RBI apiece.

“I told the guys from the very first day, 'Anything can happen if you play this season for the playoffs,'” Meyer told the Suburban Life. “They believed that and they worked so hard on it. Attitude and effort is what we ask of them.

“Attitude and effort will get you a long way in baseball and if life and that's what they believed in. They had the greatest attitudes, they put forth 100 percent all the time, they competed like champions and they are champions."

The Lions finished 23-10-1: a record less than the 2012 squad’s 31-6, but with the biggest difference of all: the 2A state title trophy.