The Broken Bow American Legion seniors baseball team claimed the B6 area tournament championship Tuesday on their home field. Broken Bow completed an undefeated run through the tournament with an 11-1 win over Minden in the championship round. Coy Wardyn set the tone with a strong starting pitching performance going 5 2/3 innings giving up 1 run on 2 hits and striking out 4. Brice Chaplin came on in relief in the sixth to finish the game. Chaplin threw 1 1/3 innings of no hit relief while striking out 2. Broken Bow started to pull away in the third when they sent 8 men to the plate and scored 4 runs. The Bow seniors would add two more in the 4th and then put the game away with a 4 run seventh inning. Seven different players collected a hit for Broken Bow. Drew Ellis had a multi-hit game finishing 2 for 4 with 1 RBI. Coy Wardyn and Max Denson each drove in 2 runs.
Broken Bow improves to 22-8 on the season and advances to state. Broken Bow will be among the teams competing in the American Division tournament which will be hosted by Auburn. It was originally thought that Broken Bow may end up in the National Division tournament hosted by Minden but due to an American Legion baseball scheduling rule it has been confirmed that Broken Bow will travel to Auburn. The rule states that if a host team (in this case Minden) of the state divisional tournament finishes as either the area tournament runner-up or champion that team will return to their host state tournament site to fill the area champion or runner-up seed in the bracket and the 1st or 2nd place team in the tournament (in this case Broken Bow) will fill that spot at the alternate site.
Broken Bow will begin play in the state tournament on Saturday, August 2nd. All Broken Bow state games will be broadcast on KBBN 95.3 FM and kbbn.com.
