Entering the final few weeks of the season, the Augustana Vikings baseball team sat in fifth in a tightly contested College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin (CCIW) conference with just eleven more games of conference play to rise or fall in the rankings, with just the top six teams going on to compete in the CCIW tournament.
The Vikings headed into their final stretch of the season looking to win as many in-conference games as possible, potentially climbing to as high as the third spot in what has been a competitive CCIW all year. The first matchups were iffy, coming off a series loss at Illinois Wesleyan University, the team lost their next game against Wheaton College before taking two out of three against Carroll University.
After leaving that stretch with a record of 2-2, Fifth-Year senior Alec McGinnis specifically, he and his teammates were looking to have a good showing against the number one team in the CCIW, Carthage College.
“Carthage over the weekend is a big one,” McGinnis said. “They are the first-place team, and we get three games against them, so you never know. A couple wins this weekend, winning the series, will move us up tremendously in the ranks, depending on what everyone else does. Every game matters. Every game matters all year, but especially now, we can’t take these games for granted.”
With the future of the season in jeopardy, Augustana would need to band together and find ways to scrape together wins, regardless of their opponent, if they were to avoid missing the tournament entirely for the first time since 2015.
The Vikings would kick off the week on Wednesday, April 23, losing 11-3 at home against North Central College, putting even more weight on their series against Carthage the ensuing weekend. Nobody said it would be easy, but finding a spot in the tournament was looking increasingly difficult. Sophomore Jack Buckalew noted that he felt the season needed to play out to see the Vikings make the postseason in baseball.
“I think with baseball, you just need to get hot at the right time,” Buckalew said. “We have six conference games left. We travel to Kenosha to take on Carthage this weekend, and those three games could turn the tables for us. We’re just fighting for those last few spots, and we just need to find a way to win these series, and that’s the way to get it done.”
The weekend wouldn’t start hot for the Vikings as they would fall in back-to-back contests on Saturday, 10-0 and 6-2. After dropping the first two against Carthage, the Vikings would need to come out swinging in game three to have hopes of continuing their season past the regular season, and they would do just that.
After the Vikings fell behind 2-0 in the second inning, both teams would trade scoring runs before the Firebirds put up two runs in the sixth, as well as tacking on three more in the next frame, giving Carthage a commanding 13-8 lead over the Vikings heading into potentially the final two innings of one of the most pivotal games Augustana will have this season.
In the top of the eighth a Kaileb Hackman home run to left-center brought the Vikings within three runs. In the top of the ninth inning, with two outs and the bases loaded, on a 3-2 count, Kaileb Hackman struck out to conclude game three of the series. The Vikings came up short, 13-10.
With the chances of a CCIW tournament running out, longtime baseball commentator for the Vikings, Matthew Nicol, elaborated on the necessary outcome for the Vikings if they wish to continue their season.
“All roads to the CCIW Conference Championship run through Carthage,” Nicol said. “Getting swept is tough in and of itself, but you need to take at least one game because at the end of the season, each conference win’s importance gets magnified. They [the Vikings] need to go 3-0 over their final games, and I believe it requires Wheaton to lose all three games to Millikin University and North Central College to beat North Park in all three.”
