Stevenson tops Wauconda for NSC title

Back in April, the Stevenson baseball team barely needed to break a sweat to handle Wauconda.

But on Thursday, the Patriots were sweating bullets as Wauconda came oh-so-close to beating them on their own field for the North Suburban Conference championship.

Stevenson wound up escaping with a 5-4 victory, but only after topping Wauconda’s clutch rally with a clutch rally of its own that ended on an RBI single by centerfielder Max Golembo.

“We beat those guys up pretty bad the last time we played them,” Golembo said of the Patriots’ 14-1 victory over Wauconda on April 15. “But we knew they were going to come at us hard this time. It’s the conference championship and we knew they weren’t going to just lie down for us. We expected a tough game.”

The Bulldogs gave Stevenson, which improved to 25-4 in winning its second straight North Suburban Conference championship, perhaps even more than expected.

Heading into the top of the seventh inning, Wauconda trailed Stevenson 4-3 and was down to its last out.

That’s when Erik Maki, who was 0-for-3 up to that point, smashed a double into left-center that scored Tony Kaminsky, who had reached earlier on a single.

“It was so exciting for us (to get back into the game),” Maki said. “I knew we could do it.

“We came in confident that we could win this game and play with them.”

The Bulldogs, after all, are a much different team than they were in mid-April when they took their lumps from Stevenson. They’ve been on fire lately and entered the conference championship game having won six straight Prairie Division games to narrowly clinch the title.

“We just hit a stretch where we started to believe that we could get the job done,” said Wauconda coach Bill Sliker, whose team went 10-2 in the Prairie Division and is now 16-10 overall. “You could even see that today. They believed that it wasn’t over until it was over and we scratched back.

“But so did Stevenson. Hats off to them. They came up with the big hit when they needed to.”

The Patriots, who were representing the Lake Division after cruising through it with an 11-1 record, quickly brought Wauconda back down to earth. Third baseman Mike Martin led off the bottom of the seventh with a double.

After getting an out, the Bulldogs elected to intentionally walk Stevenson’s next two batters to load the bases.

That brought up Golembo, who had already driven in 2 runs earlier in the game with a double.

“Max has been our key hitter lately and today he came through again,” Stevenson coach Paul Mazzuca said. “During his at-bat, we had a little conference and we were talking about a squeeze situation, but he said, ‘I’ll put it in play. I’ll get a hit.’ And I was like ‘OK.’ He’s been seeing the ball well and he did again.”

Golembo’s single to center brought in Martin and the celebration at home plate began.

It was a familiar scene for the Patriots, who won the North Suburban Conference championship last year prior to advancing all the way downstate and earning third place in Class 4A.

“We’re a completely different team than last year,” Golembo said. “We’ve kind of wanted to make our own identity. We don’t have all the superstars we had last year, but we have a lot of very good players. We hit as a team, we have a lot of pitching. We’re not just the ‘Year After’ team. We’re our own team and we’ve had a really good season, too, and this is just adding to it.”

Besides Golembo, two other players for Stevenson had multiple hits.

Shortstop Adam Walton had a triple and a double and first baseman Jacob Sholl had 2 singles.

For Wauconda, Kaminsky was the only player with more than one hit. He had 2 singles.