The Tennessee Volunteers are (co-)champions of the SEC.
Tennessee completed the sweep of the #24 South Carolina Gamecocks on Saturday afternoon 4-1. Zander Sechrist picked up the win with a sterling performance, tossing six innings of shutout baseball while allowing just 4 hits and striking out 4. Aaron Combs picked up the save for the Vols. Kavares Tears and Dalton Bargo led the Vols at the plate with two hits each.
The game remained scoreless until the fourth inning. Tears lined a double to right center to plate Hunter Ensley.
From there the Vols managed to push the lead out to a relatively comfortable margin just one inning later. After two singles and a sacrifice bunt put runners on the corners, Blake Burke pushed one through the shift to make the score 2-0. Billy Amick then beat out a grounder to third to add another run. After Amick stole second, Dylan Dreiling brought him home with another single.
South Carolina managed to bring a run across in the eighth, getting the tying run to the plate. Combs got the call from the pen and got a strfkeout and a fly out to get out of the jam. He’d get the Gamecocks 1-2-3 in the ninth to shut the door.
With the win, the Vols improved to 22-8 in SEC play, even with Kentucky, who lost 12-4 on Saturday to Vanderbilt. With the Vols taking 2 out of 3 from Kentucky earlier in the season, Tennessee gets the tiebreaker and will be the 1 seed in Hoover for the SEC Tournament next week. A solid showing there, and the Vols very well could be staring the #1 overall seed in the NCAA tournament squarely in the face.
Go Vols!