After their utter domination of Hononegah on Monday night, the Harlem Huskies are now just inches away from their first NIC-10 baseball championship in a decade.
Hononegah (24-7, 14-3 NIC-10) rallied for a 6-5 win over the Huskies on the road on Friday night to push the potential conference-championship showdown to Monday. But then Harlem (23-7-1, 15-1) used the first three innings of that one to grab control, and the Huskies’ 7-0 win over Hononegah put them in control of their own fate in the last week of the regular season.
Harlem takes on Crystal Lake Central on the road on Tuesday in a non-conference game, and then hosts East (0-16, 0-15) on Wednesday and is at East on Friday to close out the regular season. Even one win over a winless East team will seal the deal for Harlem.
“Yeah, we’re pretty close, but we still have to finish it off,” Harlem’s star pitcher Jackson Heidemann said after the complete-game victory. “Right now we have a lot of dogs out here. And they all know how to play really well in late-May and early-June. It showed tonight.”
Last year’s NIC-10 MVP Finn Stovall, who came into the game hitting .487 with eight home runs and 38 RBIs, nearly had his ninth round-tripper, but still went 2-for-3 with three RBIs to spark the Huskies early offensive surge. And Heidemann, who has quietly turned into the NIC-10’s ace, came into Monday’s game with 91 strikeouts this season, and he added nine more.
“Friday stung a little bit,” Stovall said. “But then we just knew we had to come into tonight’s game focused and energized, and that’s what we did. We showed up.”
Harlem got two runs in the first, and then Stovall’s line shot to center just missed going out during a four-run second. Braxton Fausett also cracked an RBI-single in the rally, and Stovall got another RBI-hit in the fourth to hand his buddy, Heidemann, the reigns for the rest of the way.
“Those guys are like doing me a favor out there,” Heidemann said, “so I had to pay them back.”
Heidemann, who also threw a one-hitter against Guilford last week, allowed only three hits and walked just one against Hononegah, keeping hitters off balance with breaking balls, but mostly mowing them down with heat.
“There’s no better pitcher right now in Northern Illinois; we set up the whole season for this game for Jackson,” Harlem head coach Scott McCloy said of his ace who earned his ninth win of the season Monday. “And he came through…Once we got six runs, I was pretty confident with Jackson out there. He’s got that.”
Both teams start postseason play next Thursday, May 28, as things hit the do-or-die portion of the schedule. Harlem opens up against DeKalb while Hononegah has Hampshire in the Class 4A McHenry Sectional bracket.
Jay Taft is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at jtaft@rrstar.com and sign up for the Rockford High School Sports Newsletter here at rrstar.com. Jay has covered a variety of sports, from the Chicago Bears and Blackhawks to local youth sports, since the turn of the century at the Register Star.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Jackson Heidemann sparks Harlem over Hononegah in key NIC-10 baseball win
Reporting by Jay Taft, Rockford Register Star / Rockford Register Star
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