- November 28, 2024
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Father Lopez will play Providence 7 p.m. Friday in the district championship.
BY MATT MENCARINI | SPORTS EDITOR
Rivalry games can get heated. Rivalry games in the playoffs can get flat out fiery.
In Father Lopez’s 6-3 win over P.K. Yonge Wednesday night, a win that put the team into the regional championship 7 p.m. Friday against Providence at the Ormond Beach Sports Complex, an incident in the handshake line led coach Trevor Berryhill to line his players up along the left field foul line for sprints.
“I keep saying to my team, ‘I don’t care about the other team. I don’t care about the weather. I only care about my guys,’” Berryhill said. “I can’t control what anybody else does, I’m not going to get into what my guys said they did, it’s not important."
Berryhill says he has instructed his team how to act in every situation and he "expects them to be classy." In the handshake line, a player started losing his cool, so Berryhill "put a stop to it."
Long before the post-game sprints, the Green Wave took control of the game, scoring two runs in the bottom of the first. Another four runs in the third gave the team all they needed.
First baseman Nick Restuccia had two-out RBI singles in each of the innings, as Lopez scored three runs with two outs in the game.
Freshman third baseman Joe Skinner and senior Marcus Bright, running for catcher Zach Hawk, each scored two runs.
Pitcher Ian Farrell threw a complete game, striking out 11 batters, walking four, giving up nine hits and three runs.
“He didn’t have good stuff,” Berryhill said, emphasizing that the game was a teaching moment for the big right hander. “Ian has only thrown six games. He missed three months of our season, so he’s still not even back to normal yet. He’s a great kid, and I’ll put him out there against anybody.”
Farrell struggled to get the first out of the inning. In five of the seven innings he pitched, the leadoff batter reached base, and three of those innings it came on a walk. But he pitched himself out of some jams, stranding runners in every inning and striking out two batters in each of the last three innings.
Up next is Providence, in a game with more hardware on the line for a team that already has a district title and a school that has collected plenty so far this season.
Providence, the state championship team from a year ago, beat Father Lopez 4-0 April 16, in the Green Wave’s second-to-last regular season game: another example of Berryhill stacking his schedule with quality opponents.
“They’re a very well coached team,” he said. “They’re very disciplined, they play tremendous defense and they swing the stick. ... There are all sorts of things they try to do to put pressure on you to make mistakes. So it’ll be a dogfight.”
