Thursday’s Division 2 state championship win for the St. Mary’s baseball team was the culmination of a tumultuous couple of years for the Spartans’ group of upperclassmen. After largely sitting on the sidelines and watching their former teammates lead the way to a title victory in 2019, the group that includes now-seniors Colby Magliozzi and Terence Moynihan — as well as junior Aiven Cabral — had its 2020 season taken away due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We really had a great group coming back in 2020, but the one thing that these guys who were on that team (in 2019) did see was what it took to get to this point,” said St. Mary’s coach Derek Dana.
“Missing last year really helped just give me more time to grow and improve,” said Cabral. “But really the biggest thing it did was just motivate me more to come into this season strong and finish it off with a title.”
It just means a lot to come back and win it after all we went through with the missed season,” said Moynihan.”
A lot of players cycled off of the roster after 2020, and a large crop of underclassmen stepped in to fill the spaces. In a normal year, guys like Magliozzi and Moynihan and Cabral would have had a full year to grow and learn to be leaders. While Cabral spent a lot of time at shortstop as a freshman and also pitched in several games, many of the other players who remain from the 2019 team had to sit behind stalwart players like Lee Pacheco, John Mulready, Jared Coppola, Colin Reddy, Bobby Alcock and a host of others.
So coming into 2021 with the state tournament back in play, this year’s upperclassmen wanted to win one of their own.
“There’s not a ton of kids here from the 2019 team, but everyone on this year’s team knew what they had to do and they stepped up to do it,” said Moynihan.
“I felt like we had to bring it up a notch more and come out and win a title of our own,” said Cabral. “It was great to be a part of the 2019 team, but to be a leader here and pitch in the championship, that’s what I was looking forward to.”
But it wasn’t an easy road. With nearly half of its roster made up of sophomores and freshmen, the Spartans got off to a bit of a slow start out of the gate and started the year at 6-5. While some teams may have started to look at it as a year of growing pains, St. Mary’s decided to buckle down and grind out win after win in whatever way it could. That turned out to be the start of a stretch where the Spartans won 14 of their final 15 games.
“It just takes focus and preparation,” said Moynihan. “You can’t come out flat or you’re going to fall behind, and we just never really let that happen to us this year.”
That grit came into play again in Thursday’s win, as Magliozzi and fellow senior Dante D’Ambrosio manufactured two of the biggest runs of the game on a heads-up baserunning play in the fourth inning.
The Spartans now graduate six seniors — Magliozzi, Moynihan, D’Ambrosio, Lucas Fritz, Andrew Luciano and Lucas Rincon — and the rest of the team will be back for 2022.