The Fountain Hills High School baseball team ended its regular season with two wins over No. 10 Scottsdale Christian Academy (8-7) last week. The Falcons hold the No. 3 ranking at the time of writing, and they will host their first playoff game next Tuesday, May 2, at 4 p.m. at Fountain Hills Middle School.

The Falcons celebrated senior night with a 12-1 win on Monday, April 17. Senior Zach Mendello went one for two at the plate and had an RBI, and fellow seniors Devyn Hernandez, Tim Lamar and Kyle Biebrich combined to score four runs for the Falcons.

Mendello went two for two in the 8-2 win at Scottsdale on Thursday, April 20, and added another RBI and a run. Senior Cy Dethlefs pitched five innings in relief and had six strikeouts compared to just two hits allowed and one walk.

“The seniors, it’s different for each player,” head coach Bob Langer said. “I think they’ve all had an impact. We have a lot of kids on the team, so they’ve learned to assume roles and they accept their role.”

Langer said one reason they’ve been successful this season is the fact that their seniors have been great role players. The Falcons have used Lamar as a base runner since he came over to the team after spending the last three springs on the track team, and Lamar is sixth in the region in stolen bases and first on the team.

Dethlefs is another senior who joined this year. He and Biebrich have brough experience to the bullpen, and each of them have 14 strikeouts this year. Biebrich is the only senior to play all four years with the program, and he knows the ins and outs of Falcon baseball.

“They have a lot of knowledge about the game they can share with us,” sophomore Aidan Cronican said. “We’re a really young team, I think. We have one senior that starts, so they can share a lot of stuff they’ve experienced.”

The Falcons have eight underclassmen on varsity this year, but they had 13 last year. They’ve grown a lot and improved their team batting average from .280 last year to .317, and they improved their on base percentage from .395 to .448 this year.

The underclassmen showed they were capable last year when they made the play-in tournament as the No. 21 seed. They all grew, and junior Nathan Hughes and sophomores Eli Johnson and Cronican hit their first career home runs this season.

Junior Tyler Langer had four home runs last year, and he hit his fifth home run of this season in the third inning of senior night. Cronican hit his first career home run on the play after Langer’s, and the Falcons exploded for six runs in that third inning.

The Falcons started down 1-0 after the first inning but tied it up in the second and took the lead with their home runs in the third. Cronican also pitched one strikeout and allowed three hits and zero runs in five innings.

The Falcons were down 2-0 on the road in the season finale, but they broke loose for five runs in the fourth and went on to win 8-2. Cronican, Mendello and sophomore Zion Sidhu all had two hits, and Hughes led the team with two RBIs.

The Falcons grew during the season as well as the offseason. Scottsdale Christian came into the season hot after winning the 2A state championship last year, and they beat Fountain Hills 16-1 in the first game this season. Tournament games don’t affect rankings, and the Falcons got redemption from their biggest loss of the season.

“Every single day we came to practice and got better,” Cronican said. “We just worked on all the little things that we didn’t do in the first Scottsdale Christian game, and we executed them in both of these ones.”

The Falcons will practice like normal and will find out who their first round opponent is after the play-in games Wednesday, April 26. It does not appear junior Kyan Taylor will be able to pitch after injuring his shoulder against Northwest Christian on April 13, but Langer plans to use a committee approach unless someone gets hot in the playoffs.

The Falcons have always been a play-in team under Langer’s head coaching. If they maintain a top-four ranking, they will be able to host the first round at 4 p.m. next Tuesday, May 2, and the second round on Saturday, May 6, at 2 p.m. The quarterfinals will be from May 9 to May 13, at the Goodyear Baseball Complex.

“Every practice, they get about 65-70 swings,” Langer said. “It’s not just going up there and hitting, its different things we work on. They’re getting to be better hitters. You can’t do it over night, it’s a process. They’re all buying into it, they’re picking each other up, their attitudes are great, and they’re putting the work in.”