Walton-Verona baseball coach Andrew Sien offered a geography lesson Tuesday.
The Eighth Region All “A” champion Bearcats meet Lyon County in the quarterfinals of the All “A” Classic state tournament at 6:30 p.m. EDT, Saturday, at Daviess County High School in Owensboro.
Sien’s reminder: Walton-Verona is the southernmost Northern Kentucky school and should be mentioned if you’re talking local high school baseball.
“People forget about us, but we’ve got a good baseball team,” Sien said.
Junior pitcher Bronson Corpus hears more than a little small-town-not-many-players-so-they-can’t-be-any-good bias.
“I feel like our team this year has a bunch of hard-hitting players, a bunch of good pitchers … great defense,” Corpus said.
Walton-Verona is a state All “A” fixture – this year’s trip is the Bearcats’ 12th. They won their eighth straight regional trophy, fifth consecutive sectional game (12-2 victory over Seventh Region winner Kentucky Country Day last Thursday) and reached the finals in 2021 and ’23.
The Bearcats’ 12-9 record looks ordinary, but it isn’t. The Bearcats have won five of six twice, a road win over Ninth Region postseason contender Beechwood (5-3 on March 22), a home victory over defending Eighth Region champion Simon Kenton (6-3 on April 9) and Tuesday’s 9-0 shutout of Dixie Heights.
“I would say we’re a high-contact group,” Sien said. “We manufacture runs. We have a few guys with some big-time pop, but otherwise, we can kind of execute a lot of things up and down the order. From a pitching perspective, we’re looking to throw a lot of strikes and be sound defensively. Situational defense is something we work on every single day in practice because we believe those are the little things that you know help you win or lose baseball games.”
Walton-Verona started the season at 5-1, followed by the first of two three-game losing streaks – the Bearcats fell to Paul Laurence Dunbar, Bishop Brossart and McNicholas.
“Our energy was down,” junior Miles Lehmkuhl said.
Walton-Verona earned its berth to Owensboro with Eighth Region All “A” wins over Gallatin County, Owen County and Eminence by a combined 35-2. To Corpus, beating Beechwood and Simon Kenton were equally significant.
“We obviously loved that (Beechwood) win right out of the gate,” Corpus said. “We also loved the Simon Kenton win … it gives us a little bit better of a chance to get the No. 1 seed going into (32nd) Districts.”
The Bearcats carry a .284 team batting average. Junior Kainan Held leads the team in hitting at .386, senior Aidan Kerns is next at .365, Lehmkuhl hits .344, and senior Evan Seibold is fourth at.324.
Beating Dixie Heights snapped a three-game losing streak. Held was 4-for-4 with two doubles and four RBI, and Corpus, who allowed just one hit and struck out seven over four innings on 74 pitches, many on his new two-seam fastball.
“And then there was a handful of swing and misses … on my slider, changeup and splitter (split-finger fastball),” Corpus said.
Corpus (3-1 for the season) has 45 strikeouts and a 1.47 earned run average over 28.2 innings pitched. He said his release point from the three-quarter angle is similar to Los Angeles Angels pitcher Ben Joyce, who is currently on the 15-day injury list.
Walton-Verona’s half of the quarterfinal bracket looks the toughest. If the Bearcats take out the Lyons, ranked 13th in the prepbaseballreport.com poll, they could face No. 3 Sayre (the Spartans meet Beechwood at 4 p.m. EDT Saturday) in Sunday’s semifinals and No. 10 Owensboro Catholic, the defending All “A” state champion, in the finals.
Winning the state All “A” tournament is this week’s obvious objective, but Kerns, like Sien and the rest of the Bearcats, wants folks to remember that their part of southern Boone County is still part of Northern Kentucky.
“We’re not a Ninth Region team, so a lot of those schools tend to forget,” Kerns said. “But I mean, we saw (against Dixie) what happens. If you bring energy against those big schools, you can beat ‘em.”