Craig Builders repeats as champs

McIntire Little League regular season champion Craig Builders put together a couple of huge innings offensively to hold off Central champ Kiwanis Club and win its second straight Charlottesville City title, 13-5, at Pen Park on Monday.

Craig Builders knocked off Central runner-up Big Jim’s 6-4 in Saturday’s semifinal to advance to Monday’s final, and head coach Bill Pollard was counting on his troops to deliver when it mattered most, as they have shown in crunch time all season.

“We were in second place with four games left [in the regular season] and we beat the first-place team [Barracks Road] three times over a course of six days, and in two of those games we were down in the sixth inning and came back to win,” Pollard said. “The momentum just started rolling, and it’s been just tremendous working with these kids.”

Kiwanis (20-4) cruised past Monticello champion Korner Restaurant, 16-3, on Saturday, and it looked as if they would jump out to an early lead in the championship on Monday. Kiwanis’ Connor Gillispie led off the game with a triple to left, but Jake Allen of Craig Builders was called upon in early relief, and got out of the inning unscathed.

Craig Builders (18-4) got on the board first in the top of the second inning on a Gabriel Rody-Ramanzi RBI double that scored Michael Hamady. Three batters later, Allen smashed a three-run homer over the fence right-center, and Craig Builders led 4-0.

“He is a little man out there,” Pollard said of Allen, who has been the team leader all year. “He just takes control, and he’s so tough and so strong, and he just looks other kids in the eye and makes them step up and perform.”

Allen finished 3 for 3 with three runs and four RBI.

Kiwanis came back with two runs in the home half of the second, as Logan Dunaway scored on a double steal and Gillispie later doubled to score Mark Thomas, and Craig Builders led 4-2.

The Builders then poured it on in the third, sending 13 batters to the plate and tacking on seven runs on four hits to push the lead to 11-2, highlighted by a two-run double by Jake Hylton.

“It was very important [to have a big inning] because the Kiwanis are a strong team defensively- they may be the best team we’ve seen all year- and we knew if we didn’t hit the holes, we were going to have a tough time with them,” admitted Pollard. “We knew at any minute, they could unleash and come back on us, so we had to keep pounding. It was important that our guys didn’t get over-confident.”

Kiwanis again battled back, scoring two more runs in the third to cut the lead to 11-4, but that would be the closest they would get.

“You can’t make a lot of mistakes against a good ball team that’s going to hit the ball that well, and expect to come out on top,” Dunaway said. “You have good days and you have bad days, and a couple of my key guys had a tough day today.”

Several players from each team were selected to their respective leagues’ All-Star teams and will compete throughout the summer in three age divisions in hopes to advance to the state tournament.

“These kids are fighters,” Dunaway said. “I’ve watched a lot of them since they were nine years old develop as ballplayers, and I told them tonight that I expect to read about them throughout their careers.”