A surge down the stretch of the regular season by the UC Santa Barbara baseball team culminated in a Big West Conference regular-season championship.
The Gauchos won their final nine conference games and clinched the regular-season championship with a 5-3 victory over UC Riverside on Saturday. UCSB will be the top seed at the Big West Baseball Championship tournament next week.
“We met after the Fullerton weekend when we lost two out of three and we actually met right out in front of that ]conference champions] sign as a group and talked about some of the history of the program and some of the teams that have been behind or have to win a bunch of games at the end,” Checketts said. “We mapped it out and said, ‘You guys can do it, but you're going to have to almost win out,’ and we did. We won nine straight conference games after that.”