SANBORN — SUNY Niagara’s season has been defined by the zero at the end of its name. Now they have a No. 1 at the beginning.
For the first time in eight previous berths, the Thunderwolves earned the top seed in the NJCAA Division III World Series. After finishing the regular season and Region III tournament 49-0, SUNY Niagara will vie for its first national championship.
The Thunderwolves open the tournament against No. 8 Century (Minnesota) at 4 p.m. Saturday at Falcon Park in Auburn. It won’t be the first time the teams have met this season, with SUNY Niagara taking a doubleheader against Century by a combined 13-1 in the RussMatt Invitational on March 12.
“I think you’re looser now,” SUNY Niagara coach Matt Clingersmith said. “You want to get to the dance and that’s on your mind. And now you’re in the dance. I know I’m relieved. It feels like I have 10 pounds off my back. This is what you work for is to get to the World Series.”
Clingersmith admitted there were a bit more nerves for the region tournament than usual. SUNY Niagara was expected to roll through the tournament, one it didn’t win a year ago. And there was the added factor that it was undefeated, joining NAIA LSU-Shreveport as the only unbeaten college baseball teams in the country.
But that record has been hanging over the Thunderwolves since April. SUNY Niagara returned from the RussMatt in Florida with a 16-0, a year after going 12-6 in the tournament last season.
But the Thunderwolves shrugged off any doubts or concerns about losing a game all tournament and now they are one win from breaking the program’s single-season record. They have won their five postseason games by a combined score of 57-7 and have outscored opponents 484-96 all season.
Four starters return from last year’s team in Gasport’s Gavyn Boyle, Braden Hill, Nigel Sebastianelli and Weston Thompson. The quartet hit .231 with 20 RBIs last postseason, but they have bumped it to .515 and 26 RBIs this year.
Boyle and Sebastianelli have carried the biggest bats, with Boyle going 8 for 15 with nine RBIs, seven of which came against Finger Lakes in the Region III title game. Sebastianelli, meanwhile, is hitting .500 for the season and bumped it to .550 and eight RBIs in the postseason.
“We took (last year) personally,” said Boyle, who has 17 RBIs in 10 career postseason games. “We all said we want to be back there and win the thing. So there’s definitely a little bit of revenge in there. And we went back (to the Region III tournament) and took care of business.”
Should the Thunderwolves win their first game of the double-elimination World Series, they would face the winner of No. 4 Dallas-Richland (Texas) and No. 5 Northern Essex (Massachusetts), a team they were eliminated by in a 9-8 game in the 2023 World Series.
There is a bit of a relief knowing there is a one-loss cushion. SUNY Niagara lost in the second round in 2012 and 2017 and lost in the first round in 2021, but still made the national championship game in all three years.
But Clingersmith knows that it’s a lot easier to traverse the bracket without a loss, especially during the first two rounds. Winning usually leads to a fresher bullpen over the course of the tournament and there are perks to advancing to the championship round unscathed.
Not only does the winner of the championship bracket get a day off on May 27, but they need to be beaten twice to lose. In all three of their previous championship game appearances, the Thunderwolves already had one loss to their record and they lost two of those games by one run apiece, including a 10-inning affair in 2012.
“It’s extremely stressful taking that long way,” said Clingersmith, who is 5-3 in World Series-opening games. “If you lose, you’ve got to burn a lot more pitching. You have to constantly keep hitting, you’ve got to play more games in a shorter period of time. We’d like to stay in the winner’s bracket as long as possible.”