The Central College baseball team clinched its first outright Iowa Conference regular season title in 64 years on Sunday with a doubleheader sweep at Cornell. Coach Adam Stevens team won a share of the title back in 2006 but this is the program’s first outright championship since 1948.
“The Iowa Conference is just so competitive there is so much parity in the league and it’s really tough to get a conference title outright,” Stevens says. He says he is proud of the team and how hard they have worked.
Stevens says it takes a consistent effort to win a regular season title. “That was a big emphasis for us coming into this year, we were really up and down last year.”
Stevens says a big part of their success is a pitching staff that sports a 2.22 earned run average and opponents are only batting .220 on the season. The Iowa Conference Tournament begins May 10th in Cedar Rapids and Stevens wants the Dutch to approach it like they need to win the tournament to advance to the division three regionals.
“There’s 17 at-large bids in the country and there’s about 400 division three baseball teams, so they are very tough to get,” Stevens says. He says Buena Vista got a bid last year and did well and that will hopefully help the conference, but he wants to win the conference tournament and get the automatic bid.
Central is 28-9 overall.