Gibbard leads Pennington past PDS in Prep B tourney

PENNINGTON » When you enjoy what you do, you have a good chance to be successful at it.

That’s the approach the Pennington School and Princeton Day School varsity baseball teams have been taking toward the 2021 season.

Pennington junior Max Gibbard, for instance, is thrilled with being a pitcher and leadoff hitter for head coach Steve Kowalski’s Red Raiders.

Gibbard, a right-hander, showed just how much by throwing a three-hitter, while also providing two hits and two runs to his team’s 12-2, six-inning win over the Panthers in the opening round of the New Jersey Independent Schools Athletics Association Prep B Tournament Saturday.

Fourth-seeded Pennington

(5-5-1) will head to topseeded Morristown-Beard (64) for Monday’s 4 p.m. semifinal (weather permitting).

“I love pitching,” said Gibbard, a Yardley, Pa. native who usually plays third base or shortstop when not pitching. “I had a good game, but this was more about our fielding. We had a great game in the field.”

It was a far cry from the last time the two teams met five days earlier when the Red Raiders took a six-run lead into the bottom of the seventh inning, only to see PDS rally to tie the game, 11-11.

This time around, Gibbard got out of a second-and-third, one-out jam in the top of the first inning by striking out Hunter von Zelowitz and opposing pitcher Shivam Singh.

Then Gibbard and his teammates put together a five-run rally in the bottom of the frame. Bryce Meccage doubled home Will Bercaw to open the scoring. Lorenzo Amico and Ray Heaton also drove in runs to push the lead to 5-0.

Head coach Jeff Young’s fifth-seeded Panthers (1-8-1) made the game quite interesting when they scored a pair of unearned runs in the third inning, highlighted by an RBI single from von Zelowitz.

“It was really just two innings where we had trouble today,” PDS junior first baseman Jackson Bailey said, referring to the first and sixth innings. “Without those, this was a 2-2 game.”

Bailey, who’d hit a home run one night early at North Brunswick Community Park, came back to get two hits yesterday. But that was all that Gibbard, who hit two batters, did not walk any and struck out five, allowed.

“I have a ton of confidence in our team,” Gibbard said.

“Yeah, we had one bad inning, but I knew we’d be OK. We fought back. That’s what matters.”

After getting back an unearned run in the bottom of the third, Gibbard led off the fourth with a double and came around to score on Meccage’s second (of three) RBI.

After PDS turned its second double play to avoid further damage in the fifth, Pennington put the 10-run rule into effect by loading the bases with no outs in the sixth against relief pitcher Connor Topping, who’d given the Panthers a solid 4.2 innings.

Then, after Meccage and Luke Kavulich pushed across runs, Caleb Hibbert doubled with one out off new pitcher Ryan Vandal to clear the basepaths.

PDS (1-8-1) 002 000 — 2 3 4 Pennington(5-5-1) 501 105 — 12 9 3

2B: Meccage, Gibbard, Hibbert (P); RBIs: von Zelowitz (PDS), Meccage 3, Kavulich, Amico, Hibbert 3, Heaton (P).

WP — Gibbard (3-1); LP — SSingh (0-2).