Team and individual accomplishments
Baseball captures second straight America East championship
Freshman catcher Eddie Posavec delivered a bases-loaded RBI single to deep left field with one out in the bottom of the 12th inning to give Binghamton a dramatic 8-7 walk-off win over top-seeded Stony Brook in the America East championship game at LeLacheur Park. By capturing the program’s second straight conference title and third in the last six years, the Bearcats (25-25) advance to the NCAA tournament and will await their regional assignment when the 64-team draw is announced at noon on Monday on ESPNU.
Posavec’s hit ended the longest title game in the 25-year baseball history of the America East. The win capped a gutsy showing by an injury-depleted BU team that became just the second team in conference history to win four straight elimination games and the first to do so by knocking off the tournament top seed in back-to-back games. After dropping its opener to No. 2 seed Hartford, the No. 3 Bearcats rattled off elimination-game wins over No. 4 Maine (6-3) and Hartford (8-0) before edging Stony Brook twice with late-inning heroics. Binghamton forced a winner-take-all game with a 4-3 win Saturday night and then exploded for a season-high 21 hits in Sunday’s final.
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See the video of the championship win
Two student-athletes represent Binghamton at NCAA Forum
Women’s basketball forward Morgan Murphy and track & field middle distance runner Shavonna Hinton recently took part in the Fifth Annual NCAA Career in Sports Forum. The event was held June 5-8 in Indianapolis.
Organized and directed by the NCAA Leadership Development department, the Career in Sports Forum was created to provide student-athletes with a broader scope of the career tracks available within the sports business, with the primary focus on intercollegiate athletics. The forum provides student-athletes interactive experiences with successful individuals in sports business and a peek into their day-to-day duties and responsibilities.
Baseball standout Bereszniewicz drafted by Los Angeles Dodgers
Binghamton center fielder Bill Bereszniewicz was picked by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 28th-round of the Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft on Saturday.
Bereszniewicz, a first-team all-conference player who led the America East in hitting (.367) and stolen bases (23), is the ninth Binghamton player to be drafted since 1990 and the third in the last three years. He is BU’s earliest field position player to be taken since catcher Dan Gray went to the Dodgers in the seventh round of the 1990 draft.
“I’m thrilled for Billy ... nobody has worked harder for this opportunity,” head coach Tim Sinicki said. “There is no doubt in my mind he’ll make the most of it. He turned himself into a dynamic player on both sides of the ball and was without question our most valuable player this spring.”
Baseball championship season comes to an end at NCAA Regional
Binghamton rallied from a 4-0 hole and came within two outs of a stunning upset before 19th-ranked Nebraska scored three runs in the top of the ninth inning to knock the Bearcats out of the NCAA Regional, 8-6, Saturday afternoon from Reynolds Stadium.
Less than a week after being on the winning side of a dramatic late-inning rally, BU suffered the flip-side when the Huskers sent nine men to the plate in their final at-bat and used a walk, flare single to shallow right and a squeeze bunt to score the decisive runs. Still showing no quit, BU brought the tying run to the plate in the bottom of the ninth before Nebraska’s first baseman dug out a throw in the dirt to record the final out of the game.
Men’s tennis pair earns national ranking
Binghamton men’s tennis doubles tandem Alexander Maisin and Aswin Nambi has earned a final ITA national ranking of No. 83 - the first time in BU’s Division I tenure that a doubles pair has been ranked at year’s end.
Maisin, a sophomore, and Nambi, a junior, were also ranked 10th in the Northeast. Their signature win was an 8-5 triumph over 32nd-ranked Jones and Heugas of VCU on February 28. That top duo from VCU advanced to the second round of the NCAA Championship.
Maisin and Nambi won 11 matches together in the spring, including victories in BU’s matches against No. 51 Central Florida, No. 58 Penn State, Penn and Buffalo.
Men’s tennis sophomore Hazarika repeats as Player of Year
Binghamton sophomore Sid Hazarika repeated as America East Men’s Tennis Player of the Year after the Bearcats captured the program’s seventh consecutive conference crown and 10th in the last 13 years. Hazarika, will share the award in 2014 with UMBC’s Justin Carter.
He won 19 matches this year, including 14 dual wins.
It was the sixth straight year (and 10th in 13 yrs.) that a Binghamton player was chosen as America East Player of the Year.
Men’s tennis captures seventh consecutive title
Binghamton men’s tennis (16-11) put an exclamation point on its tenure in the America East with a 4-0 win over Stony Brook in the championship match Sunday morning at the Wilde Lake Community Center. The conference title was the program’s seventh consecutive and 10th in 13 years. During the current seven-year run under head coach Adam Cohen, BU has surrendered just six points in 14 matches
The 2014 championship is be the last men’s tennis event sponsored by the America East and unlike past years, the Bearcats will not advance to the NCAA tournament, as the sport sponsorship (4 schools) fell short of the NCAA requirement. Binghamton will begin its membership in the Mid-American Conference next fall and will be eligible to compete for that conference’s NCAA automatic bid in the spring.
Softball ranks second in nation in stolen bases
With the 2014 softball season having just concluded, the NCAA has released its final Division I statistics. Binghamton finished the year ranked second overall with 2.55 stolen bases per game and No. 16 with 0.30 triples per game. There were 289 NCAA Division I softball programs that competed in 2014.
Individually, senior second baseman Jessica Bump ranked No. 10 with 0.72 stolen bases per game while sophomore Sydney Harbaugh was No. 16 (0.68). Bump’s 34 stolen bases this season also set the Binghamton program record while Harbaugh had the second-highest mark with 30 thefts.
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