Southington’s tourney run comes to end
Blue Knights lose to Warde, 7-5, in Class LL title game
Zack Broderick exited Saturday’s Class LL championship game with one out in the seventh inning to sporadic “MVP” chants and a standing ovation from Fairfield Warde’s section behind the first base dugout before the Mustangs held on to defeat Southington, 7-5. In between hugs from his teammates, Broderick repeatedly raised his right index finger to the sky.
“My grandma passed away two weeks ago,” he said after the game as emotion began to spew. “I did it for her. It means a lot to me.”
Broderick finished 6 ⅓ innings with 10 strikeouts.
“You give Zack Broderick the baseball and you know what you’re gonna get out of it,” Mustangs coach Brett Conner said. “(The team) plays with a lot of heart and they rally around each other.”
The senior pitcher set the tone early when he stranded two runners in the first and recorded all three outs via strikes. In Fairfield Warde’s half of the inning, successful small ball pushed the first run across. Griffin Polley laid down a perfect squeeze bunt to the third base side that brought in Roman DiGiacomo and landed Polley safely at first.
Southington returned the favor with a squeeze bunt of its own to tie the game at one in the top of the third. Colin Crowley recorded the Blue Knights’ first hit of the game when he ripped a one-out triple down the right field line, and Jaden Maia brought him in with a well-placed bunt to the first base side.
Fairfield Warde responded with three runs in its half of the third to take a 4-1 lead. Near the end of that frame, Southington pitcher Vincent Borghese took a hard line drive off his foot but stayed in the game.
“We rallied around Vinny and he carried us through (the postseason),” Southington head coach Stan Switala said. “He battled, he’s a gamer — he never wants to come out.”
Southington had allowed just two runs through its four tournament games entering Saturday.
The Blue Knights threatened with two runners in scoring position
to start the top half of the sixth inning after North Carolina commit Jackson Rusiecki drilled a ball off the base of the left field wall, but Broderick recorded his ninth and 10th strikeouts of the game and induced a flyout to get away unscathed.
“I got a little worried, obviously we were in a close game still,” Broderick said. “As long as I struck
one of the kids out and put two outs on the board, I could do whatever I needed to do — that’s exactly what I had to do.”
Warde finished its scoring with a run in the fifth inning and backto-back RBI singles in the sixth. The Mustangs led 7-1 before Griffin Paddy relieved Broderick in the seventh. The game was not over, though, as Southington rallied for four runs with two outs after big hits from Rusiecki and Justin Chiulli that cut the deficit to 7-5.
The Blue Knights’ fire was one tough to put out. They were playing for something bigger than themselves after dedicating the season to late coach Charlie Lembo who died from cancer just before the tournament began. Lembo headed the Blue Knights for 10 seasons — from 2011 until he got sick in 2021 — and never had a losing year.
“They all rallied around Coach Lembo and his legacy,” Switala said. “We’re not only playing for our program and our town, we’re playing for him.”
The state title was the first for Warde since 1981 when the school was named Andrew Warde. The program is now 2-2 all-time. Southington is 3-11 in title games and has not won since 1999.
“They give it their best for this program and for this community — it’s really something special and we felt it at the beginning of the year, we worked extremely hard,” Conner said. “They’re state champions today, they’re state champions in the classroom and they’re state champions in the community. They’re only going to be successful.”