There is a new Senior League East Region Tournament champion.
The team from DuBois, Pennsylvania took home the regional title with a 3-1 win over Oxford, Massachusetts on Tuesday. That victory sends the Pennsylvania squad to the Senior League World Series in Easley, South Carolina which gets underway later this week.
“We’ve been wanting this since T-ball,” DuBois manager Tim Kail said after the win. He was proud of his team, which went 5-1 in the double elimination regional tournament and will now have to turn around and head to South Carolina.
“We’re excited,” Kail said. “Now we’ve got a long night of travel.”
Senior League is a division of Little League that features players ages 13 to 16. The Senior League World Series, which for years was held in Bangor before being moved south, will be held from July 26 to Aug. 2.
DuBois pitcher Bryson Kail got the win Tuesday, pitching through a lingering arm issue that has bothered him since the state round of the Senior League schedule.
He said his approach on the mound was to “just throw strikes and let them hit it” as he and his teammates went up against an Oxford team that had beaten them 7-2 the day before.
“Nothing really special,” Kail said after his regional championship performance. “Just put up zeros and win the ball game.”
Monday’s loss to Massachusetts was the first setback of the regional tournament for the team from Pennsylvania, which had been perfect through the first four games. But that setback proved temporary, with DeBois rebounding Tuesday to bring home its fifth and decisive win of the tournament.
“We lost yesterday, but we knew what we had to do better, and we just came and played way better today,” Bryson Kail said. “We got it done.”
And it took some pivotal plays to get it done — like centerfielder London Duncan making a lunging catch to end an inning and strand a Massachusetts runner on third base, preserving a two-run lead for Pennsylvania at the time.
Tim Kail called that an “awesome” catch and said his team was already familiar with needing to bounce back from a loss in the first leg of a double elimination championship.
“The exact same thing happened to us at states. We lost the first game of the championship, came back and won it in the second one,” the manager said. “I’m like, ‘You guys don’t make this easy on us, do you?’”
In both cases, he said his team was able to come back and do what they needed to do to win.
“I’m proud of each and every one of them,” Kail said. “Couldn’t ask for a better team.”
This year’s regional tournament included a team from Maine for the first time since 2019. The squad from the towns of Gray, New Gloucester and Raymond won its initial game last week against Delaware, before falling in its next two against Massachusetts and New Jersey.
