WASHINGTON, Pa. -- The NCAA announced Monday that the Washington & Jefferson College baseball team will open NCAA Division III Regional play against Cortland on Friday, May 17.
The four-team double-elimination regional will be hosted at Robert H. Wallace '53 Field by Cortland in Cortland, N.Y. The Presidents and Red Dragons will be joined by Salve Regina University and Colby College. W&J is the third-seeded team in the four-team regional. Cortland, the host, is seeded second at 30-12-1. Salve Regina is the top seed at 33-8 while Colby is fourth with a 29-10 overall mark.
W&J is the only one of the four teams headed to the Cortland Regional to win its conference tournament. The other three squads all received at-large berths to the 2024 NCAA Tournament.
W&J earned the conference's automatic qualifying bid to the NCAA Division III Championship as winners of the PAC Championship Tournament. W&J will be making its 11th appearance in the NCAA Tournament. The Presidents enter the tournament with a 32-12 overall record in 2024.
W&J posted a 16-4 conference record during regular season play to earn the top seed in the PAC Tournament for a seventh-straight year.
The Red and Black completed a 4-0 run through the Presidents' Athletic Conference Tournament. W&J won consecutive games last week over Thiel (6-5), Waynesburg (10-3) and Grove City twice by scores of 12-5 and 4-2 to capture their 16th PAC title.
The PAC Championship is the fifth-straight for the Presidents. They are only the second conference school to ever win five-straight league titles. W&J has now won an unprecedented 16-straight games in PAC Tournament play. The Presidents have advanced through the winner's bracket and remained unbeaten in five-straight conference tournaments.
W&J has won 16 conference titles in program history. The title is the 12th during head coach
Jeff Mountain's 22-year tenure.
Junior shortstop
Jacob LaDuca played the role of hero for the Presidents. LaDuca was named Most Outstanding Player of the PAC Tournament for a second-straight season. LaDuca, who hit a walk-off 10
thinning home run to beat Grove City in last year's tournament, proved pivotal again in Saturday's title tilt. LaDuca stroked a two-run go-ahead home run in the bottom of the seventh to give W&J the eventual winning runs.
LaDuca leads the PAC with 56 runs scored, ranks second with 64 hits and fourth with 21 stolen bases.
Salve Regina has compiled a 33-8 overall record. The Seahawks finished with 13-3 in New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference (NEWMAC). Salve Regina put together a 1-2 record in the NEWMAC Championships. This is the fifth-straight season that Salve Regina has qualified for the NCAA Tournament. Both the Presidents and Seahawks have one common opponent, Mount Union, whom they both defeated.
Cortland will be making its 32nd all-time appearance in the NCAA Tournament. The Red Dragons went 2-2 in regional play at home last spring. Cortland won the 2015 NCAA Division III National Championship. The 2024 version of the Red Dragons has a 30-12-1 overall record and went 16-2 in State University of New York Athletic Conference (SUNYAC) regular season play.
W&J and Cortland share two common opponents. Both programs beat Marietta and SUNY Cobleskill in non-conference play. The programs met during the 2017 Mideast Regional at W&J. After dropping their first matchup, the Presidents claimed a 6-3 victory over the Red Dragons to win their first-ever NCAA Regional Championship.
Colby finished with a 29-10 overall record and a 9-3 record in the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC). They went 1-2 during the double elimination portion of the NESCAC Tournament. The lone common opponent between W&J and Colby was Ramapo. The Mules split a Florida doubleheader versus Ramapo on March 23. Colby beat W&J by a 5-0 score in Florida in March of 2023. That is the lone head-to-head matchup between the programs.
Salve Regina and Colby open the regional with the first game at 10 a.m. on Friday. W&J will face Cortland at 1:30 p.m. The two Thursday winners will face off Friday at 12 p.m. The two Thursday losers will play Friday morning in an elimination game at 8:30 a.m.
The NCAA announced the 60-team field that will compete in the 2024 NCAA Division III Baseball Championship. Of the 16 regional sites played Friday-Sunday, May 17-19, four teams will compete at fourteen regional sites and two teams will compete at two regional sites. The four-team regionals will use a double-elimination format and the two-team regionals will play a best-of-five series. Thirty-nine conference champions qualified automatically.
Winners of the sixteen regional tournaments will qualify for eight, best-of-three series at the super regionals, Friday-Saturday, May 24-25. The eight super regional winners will then qualify for the pool play double-elimination championship at Classic Auto Group Park in Eastlake, Ohio, Friday-Thursday, May 31-June 6, 2024.
