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Montini remains unbeaten

Montini's baseball team kept it going Thursday.

The Broncos remained the lone unbeaten in DuPage County by pulling away to an 8-1 Suburban Christian Conference crossover victory over IC Catholic Prep on the Field Turf at Elmhurst's Plunkett Park.

Behind a solid 6-inning effort from starting pitcher Sean Frontzak and an opportunistic offense, Montini improved to 9-0 overall and 5-0 in the SCC. The Broncos' toughest games are still to come, but the strong start is going a long way toward building some major team confidence.

"The kids have played real well so far, how can you be unimpressed being 9-0?" asked Montini coach Bob Landi. "We're having a nice year, but the better competition's coming up. We're not fooling ourselves about that."

Montini used its speed and took advantage of key IC Catholic Prep mistakes while scoring 4 first-inning runs without hitting the ball out of the infield. All the runs were unearned against Knights starter Grant Hennessey, who hit two batters and walked a third.

The Broncos went up 5-0 in the third inning after Tommy Long tripled and scored on Kyle Jackson's single. Jackson again singled home a run in the fourth and Pat Hennessy added a 2-run double to boost the lead to 8-0.

The Knights settled down after that with reliever Steve Stam on the mound, but the damage already had been done.

"You look at the errors and the unearned runs, and it's a 2-1 ballgame," said IC Catholic Prep coach Zach Rodeghero. "It was 8-0 in the blink of an eye, and they could have folded. But they hung around, and that's something we can build on. We stayed in the game after that tough start."

IC Catholic Prep (8-10, 3-3) scored its lone run in the bottom of the sixth on Max Faut's run-scoring single. Frontzak, who struck out seven, walked one and hit a batter, allowed the Knights' only 2 hits in the sixth before being relieved by Andrew Klysh for a perfect seventh.

Rhett Wojkovich, Long, Jackson and Hennessy had 2 hits apiece in Montini's balanced lineup.

"We've had some good pitching and we're really hitting the ball," Frontzak said. "We've got some tough games coming up, but we've got the potential to be pretty good."

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