Montini mixes it up, ousts Glenbard South

Montini's baseball team tried a little bit of everything to shake its inconsistent ways during the regular season.

With the start of the playoffs, it was time for something completely different.

Going with pitching by committee, a couple of personnel tweaks and even a new coaching style, the Broncos stormed to an 8-1 win over Glenbard South in Saturday's Class 4A Glenbard South regional final in Glen Ellyn.

"I give credit to my assistant coach, coach (Bob) Landi," said Broncos coach Bill Leeberg, who deferred his normal third-base coaching duties to Landi to mix things up. "He came up with this idea and said, 'Why don't we try something different since our pitchers haven't been able to do it all year?'"

Three pitchers, capped by a strong performance by freshman Chris Bartosz, combined on a 4-hitter for Montini (17-17), which advances to Thursday's Johnsburg sectional semifinals to play Grayslake Central.

The Broncos' bats, meanwhile, stayed hot. After taking a 2-0 first-inning lead on Tom Ruopp's 2-run double, they added 2 runs in the fourth, fifth and sixth innings.

"We've had kind of a slow season, not too great," Ruopp said. "But something clicked and we're doing really well."

An error and sacrifice fly by Jared Jayne accounted for the 2 runs in the fourth inning. Kevin Hankins, who went 3-for-4, and Mike Davis each had RBI hits in the sixth. Nick Slezak's run-scoring triple in the first inning accounted for the lone run for Glenbard South (17-19), which committed 3 costly errors.

"We didn't play well at all," said Raiders coach Mike Riley. "Defensively, we didn't play well, we didn't make pitches on the mound. It was indicative of the problems we had all year at the plate. We just couldn't get that big hit."