ON TO STATE!!! Kee baseball team claims Substate crown, earns first State Tournament berth since 2011 with 11-0 domination of Northwood-Kensett
Ending a decade-long drought without a doubt ... The Kee baseball team displays the banner signifying the Hawks’ qualification for the 2021 Iowa High School State Baseball Tournament after posting the 11-0 mercy-rule win in five innings shining bright on the scoreboard in the photo background above. That win came in the Class 1A Substate 2 Championship game played Tuesday, July 20 at Charles City High School, with the Hawks’ mercy-rule victim being a Northwood-Kensett team that had upset Class 1A top-rated Mason City Newman just a few nights earlier. Playing in a substate championship game for the first time in four years, the Hawk victory advanced them to the Class 1A State Tournament for the first time since the 2011 season, when Kee finished as the Class 1A State Runner-Up. The Hawks’ Substate Championship earned them their 20th appearance at the summer season grand finale, and the first without legendary head coach Gene Schultz at the helm of the program. Kee’s diamond dwellers were scheduled to open this year’s Class 1A State Tournament as the number-four seed in the eighth-team bracket with a Monday, July 26 first-round match-up with fifth-seeded New London.
Playing in its first Class 1A Substate Championship game since the 2017 season and looking to earn qualification for the Class 1A State Tournament for the first time in 10 seasons and the first time ever without legendary head coach Gene Schultz at the helm, the Kee baseball team was matched up with a team looking to make its own bit of history in the Class 1A Substate 2 Championship game played at Charles City High School Tuesday, July 20.
The Hawks’ substate opponent, a 14-14 Northwood-Kensett squad they had beaten earlier in the season, 6-0, in their own Shooky Fink Tournament, was coming off an eye-opening upset of top-rated and just once-beaten Mason City Newman in an 8-3 district championship shocker, ending Newman’s string of 13 consecutive State Tournament qualifications. The Vikings were looking to continue their postseason roll to their first-ever State Tournament qualification in program history, but the Hawks returned to their own traditional form and certainly did not look past that surprising Viking squad, dealing out an 11-0 mercy-rule triumph in five innings to earn the Kee baseball program’s 20th qualification for the Iowa high school summer State Baseball Tournament.
Northwood-Kensett had used a pair of homeruns - including a grand slam and a solo blast - to provide their shocking margin of victory over perennial power Newman, but the Hawks not only did not allow any of that Viking power to show but stifled the Northwood-Kensett bats to just a single hit and only three other balls that left the infield - each of them caught. Junior Tyson Cota faced just 19 batters in his complete-game five-inning mound victory, striking out nine Vikings and allowing just four total baserunners.
Three of those four Northwood-Kensett baserunners came on three walks, one in the opening frame and consecutive freebies in the fourth inning, with Cota and his defensive partners retiring the Vikings in order in both the second and third frames and none of those four Northwood-Kensett baserunners advancing past second base. The only hit the Vikings managed in the ballgame came in their final at-bats in the fifth inning, a lead-off ground ball hit between second and third bases but knocked down by junior shortstop Dalton Dibert, whose throw to first was not in time to complete the out or preserve the no-hitter. Two final strike-outs by Cota and a ground ball gobbled up by junior first baseman Jaylen Drape for an unassisted final out did preserve the shut-out and secured the mercy-rule Hawk victory.
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