The Creighton baseball team won the Big East championship in Mason, Ohio, on Saturday, after defeating UConn 7-4 to advance to the NCAA Tournament.
Creighton swept its way through the tournament, winning all three games by multiple runs to capture the Big East title for the second time in program history. It also gave the Jays their sixth Regional berth under head coach Ed Servais and marked the first time they’ve reached the tournament since 2019.
With the championship game tied and the bases loaded in the bottom of the fifth, UConn’s Ian Cooke hit Kyle Hess with a pitch, sending Teddy Deters home for the go-ahead run. Tate Gillen used a sacrifice fly to score Will MacLean and put the Jays ahead by two, and they maintained the lead the rest of the way.
After the selection show on Monday, Servais said that he is thrilled to be returning to Regionals.
“It’s fun to come here, today, knowing that we were going to see our name, rather than were we going to see our name,” Servais told reporters after the show.
The team learned that it will be headed to Fayetteville, Arkansas, as the No. 3 seed in the Regional, where the Bluejays will face No. 2 Kansas on Friday night at 7 p.m. CT. The host Razorbacks will face fourth-seeded North Dakota State (who Creighton split with during the regular season) on Friday afternoon in the first game of the Regional.
“We’re not just going there to play,” Servais said. “This team has a chance.”
With it being Servais’ last season, he said that he is just trying to take it all in and spend as much time as he can with his players.
“I’m trying to really, really make sure I emphasize enjoying being around these young people,” Servais said. “We don’t take this stuff for granted. We know how hard it is to win a game at this level, and for our guys to win 41 games, and to win 21 of the last 23, it says a lot.”
Experience is an important factor to have when building a successful season. The Jays’ roster is filled with upperclassmen and players that have been around the program for a long time. Servais believes that their training will help them in the tournament.
“I just can’t say enough about those upperclassmen and everything that they’ve done,” Servais said. “Our best teams that we’ve had here at Creighton have been led by our upperclassmen. And I think this one will go down as one of the better teams because it’s led by the upperclassmen.”
Although the team isn’t very familiar with Kansas, grad student pitcher Garrett Langrell said that the team will give their all against the Jayhawks.
“Whenever it comes down to it, we could be playing Kansas or we could be playing the Yankees,” Langrell told reporters. “It really doesn’t matter for us. Our coaches have been great all year with scouting reports and figuring out ways for the pitching staff to get out hitters and for the hitters to kind of attack these pitchers. So I think we’re going to go in there riding a lot of momentum and extremely confident.”
With the College World Series taking place at Charles Schwab field in Omaha, catcher Connor Capece — an Omaha native who graduated from Gross Catholic — said that it would be an amazing opportunity if they were able to win and make it back to Omaha.
“That would be an unbelievable experience,” Capece told reporters.
Although the Bluejays have accomplished a lot this season, there is still more work to be done. Senior pitcher, Dominic Cancellieri said that the team is exciting and ready to compete.
“It’s the greatest feeling in the world,” Cancellieri told reporters. “That’s what we set out to do each and every year, and to finally have done it in my sixth year, and then all my teammates that have been here for four years, the new guys, it’s just an amazing feeling.”
“But we’re ready to go to work and see what we can do in the Regional.”
