Two Iowa Conference baseball teams came up short in their bids to play in the NCAA division three World Series. Wartburg picked the wrong time to have a hitting slump. After winning the Iowa Conference regular season title the Knights struggled to score runs in the post season and were eliminated from a regional in Waterloo over the weekend with a 4-1 loss to Cathage College.
“I have no idea why we have become a pretty poor offensive team, it has just become a struggle for us,” according to Wartburg coach Joel Holst.
Holst says the last 2 to 3 weeks they couldn’t come up with the key hits, “I guess that’s baseball.”
Holst says there are some outstanding seniors to replace but the nucleus remains strong. One of those outgoing seniors is outfielder Jackson Litterer. “We knew we could do some big things, we didn’t know how big, we blew those expectations we had out of the water. Obviously we wanted to go farther than this…but these are memories I will have all of my life,” Litterer says.
Wartburg finishes the season with a record of 34-14. Coe College made it to the championship round of a regional in La Crosse, Wisconsin but fell twice to host Wisconsin-La Crosse on Sunday to see their season come to an end.
By Elwin Huffman, KOEL, Oelwein