SHELBY - Kaiden Blair knew he'd have to pitch well — and go the distance — if Wynford wanted a chance to win its first district championship in 28 years.
Add in throwing on a new surface and the Royals' No. 1 and No. 2 pitchers unavailable having pitched Thursday, and the pressure was on.
"It was my first game pitching on turf," Blair said. "In the first few innings … there was a learning curve."
Blair learned quickly, pitching a complete game as Wynford beat Oak Harbor 7-2 to secure the program's first trip to regionals since 1996.
"That score might not do justice for how good that team was," Blair said of the Rockets, who were coming off a big win over top-seed Edison in the district semifinals.
He also successfully got out of consecutive bases-loaded jams in the first two innings. Grant McGuire's two RBI single in the first inning scored Spencer Miller and Blair for an early 2-0 lead.
"My team gave me a bunch of runs that I could just go out there comfortably with a nice lead all game and just do my part," Blair said. "They hit the ball off me, but my team was backing me up, and we made quite a few nice plays."
Oak Harbor cut the lead in half on a Tim Marquette triple scoring Brayden Butzkin in the third, but the Royals responded with four more of their own in the fourth. Marquette came in to pitch for Brayden Myerholtz and gave up an RBI single to Weston Prenger before Landon Miller drove one to centerfield scoring Brett Crall and Drew Johnson. Miller was then walked with the bases loaded to make it 6-1.
"Self-inflicted wounds," Oak Harbor coach Nick Lance said of the errors which allowed Royals to work their way around the bases in the fourth. "Hats off to Wynford, they swing it. McGuire's the back-to-back District 9 Player of the Year, and he's the one we were worried about, but they've got more than just him. They put the ball in play, and they scored some runs on us."
Another big triple, this time from Michael LaLonde, scored Cooper Schultz to pull Oak Harbor within four. But again, Wynford responded in a big way on a Prenger single to left field scoring Johnson.
"We've been scoring a lot more runs, but here in the tournament we're starting to take bases and put pressure on the defense a little more than what we had all season," Wynford coach Tom Smith said. "Generating extra runs really comes in handy in a tournament game."
Conversely, the Rockets stranded 11 runners on base.
"We just didn't cash in," Lance said. "We had an opportunity, we were gonna try to run a squeeze, we just didn't have the pieces set. We got rushed a little bit and then kind of threw us out there, that might have taken a little bit of steam out of our sails.
"(But) I'm just proud of what my guys have accomplished this year to get back to this stage again. It says something, but we gotta get over that hurdle. And we're going to get there, we're gonna get this game. We're gonna move on to regionals sometime."
Wynford won't have to wait as the focus now shifts to a regional semifinal with Millbury Lake on Thursday at Patrick Henry High School in Hamler at 2 p.m.
And Smith knows his team will be in a good position to keep this run going if either of his aces have the ball in their hands.
"The seniors — Spencer Miller, Kaiden Blair — those guys don't get rattled on the mound," Smith said. "Whatever happens, they just keep throwing. These seniors are carrying the team right now."
And Blair hopes he can continue to carry the Royals.
"This was the biggest game I've been a part of in my life," he said. "It's nice to go out with at least a district championship.
"But we still have more work to do to try and get all the way to the state championship."
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