AMBOY – After defeating Hiawatha handily in the regional quarterfinal, the No. 7-seeded Amboy baseball team knew top-seeded Forreston was going to be a tougher task in the IHSA Class 1A Amboy Regional Semifinal.

The Clippers were unfortunately correct as they fell to Forreston, 6-1, on Wednesday, May 21.

“We knew coming in that Forreston is a great team and they’re well coached,” Amboy coach Cade Sharp said. “All of their pitchers have strong arms, so we knew whoever was on the mound was going to throw hard. Brendan Greenfield threw a great game for them. Everybody they brought in after him threw just as well.

“We played them earlier in the year and they won 10-0. We tried to game plan off of that game, but they played great again and we struggled to field it at times.”

The Cardinals (27-7) scored one run in the bottom of the first and three in the second to take a 4-0 lead into the third.

Amboy (12-13) got on the board as senior Eddie Jones hit a single, stole second and reached third on a balk before scoring on a RBI single by Clipper freshman Bryson Deery.

However, the offense ended there for Amboy and Forreston added two insurance runs in the bottom of the third for the 6-1 final.

“I’m super proud of what my guys have done all year. We’re a completely different ball club than what we were at the beginning of the year,” Sharp said. “That’s kudos to those guys because they came to practice every day and worked hard.

“We battled all year. We started the year 6-1, which was awesome. It was kind of a shock to me with how hot we started. Then we went into a slump, but what team doesn’t go into a slump in a baseball season. You know it’s coming; you just try to weather it.

“I’m super, super happy with the way my guys battled all year. They came to practice every day wanting to get better. If you look at our numbers at the beginning of the year, there were a lot of strike outs and we kicked the ball around a lot. We grew and strikeouts and errors were cut down.”

Throughout the year, a couple of the Clippers biggest wins came against Class 2A programs such as Mendota and Mercer County.

Sharp is proud of this team and its tenacity, but he knows he’ll be missing a large chunk of its nucleus next season because of graduation.

“You can’t build a better senior staff to go into a new year with. Quinn Leffelman, Dillon Merriman, Eddie Jones, Brody Christofferson, Caleb Shugars and Carson Barlow, those guys set the tone each day,” Sharp said. “You know who’s going to come to practice and lead it, and those guys did every single day. If I ever had any questions, those were the guys I went to. They’ve done it, they’ve been through a varsity baseball season a few years, and they knew how to go about it.

“To have guys like that around was priceless. You can’t have much better than what I had. Those guys are going to be missed next year. But before they left, they set the tone and the standard of what’s going to happen here in the future.”

The first-year coach thanked the seniors and the entire team for helping teach him some lessons.

He knows there are a lot more to come, but the initial classroom on the field couldn’t have gone any better.

“I’ve played baseball since I was 5 years old,” Sharp said. “I’ve never had more fun in the game of baseball than I had coaching this first year. I had so much fun. I love it here. I love the community. I love the parents. I love the staff.

“I’ve learned a ton of lessons. How much time do I have to tell you all of them? Each day was a new lesson. Going into next year, I know what I need to work on to help us be a better ball club. That comes from this year’s players and coaching staff I had around me.”