After dropping the first three games in the series, the West Virginia State baseball ended its season by rallying for an 11-8 win over the University of Charleston on Monday.
The victory followed a 9-2 loss to the Golden Eagles to begin the day and kept UC from the top seed in the Mountain East Conference South division for this week's conference tournament.
It also gave the Yellow Jackets a positive result to end the season and give them a chance to carry some momentum into the offseason.
"This was a good game because, hopefully, it can give us a little bit of a springboard into next year," West Virginia State coach Sean Loyd said. "Nobody wants to lose the last game of the season, and coming into the weekend we wanted to give ourselves a better chance to get into the playoffs, but it says a lot about our team that we dropped three and went out of contention [for the MEC tournament] but were still able to fight it out and get a win in this last one."
West Virginia State scored 10 runs in its final three innings at the plate, including a six-run eighth inning that erased a 7-5 deficit.
The Yellow Jackets (21-26, 14-18 MEC) had a couple of extra-base hits in the inning, highlighted by a two-run double from Brandon Wright. The go-ahead run came on a sacrifice fly off the bat of Chris Ruppenthal.
"We hit the ball hard a few times, we caught some breaks and had some hits drop in. We needed that," Loyd said. "It was good to see them go up and be aggressive and get the barrel on the ball to get those runs across when we needed them."
Tyler Hall was able to preserve the victory in the second game of the day for WVSU, pitching a complete game and striking out three despite allowing eight runs on 11 hits.
Wright was one of four WVSU players to finish that game with three hits, as the team finished with 20 hits overall. Wright went 3 for 6 with four RBIs while Trayvis Patterson had four hits and Jared Hunt and Jacob Frantz both finished the day with three.
Despite losing the final game of the regular season, Charleston was still able to make some history of its own in that opening win. It gave the Golden Eagles their first 30-win season in school history as they head into the postseason with a 30-20 record overall and an 18-14 mark in MEC play.
Ethan Hunt led UC by going 3 for 3 with two runs scored in the opener while Colby Johnson, Gianfranco Morello and Lee Carneal all drove in two runs in the win.
Charleston got a good outing from starting pitcher Jonathan Carr, who allowed two runs on seven hits through five innings before Brandon Harris shut the Yellow Jackets out for the last two innings to seal the victory.
Contact Michael Carvelli at 304-348-4810 or michael.carvelli@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @carvelli3.