By Tim Mastro

WILMINGTON — When Teyvion McCoy moved from second base to left field midseason for the Dover High baseball team, he wanted to keep using his infielder’s glove.

No, said coach Dave Gordon, McCoy needed a bigger glove, more suited to outfielders.

He needed every extra inch of that glove on Thursday.

McCoy made an acrobatic, juggling catch for the final out as the Senators knocked off Concord 6-5 in the second round of the DIAA state tournament. Dover (11-9), seeded 21st in this year’s open tournament, will face No. 5 seed Delaware Military Academy (16-3) on Saturday in the third round at a time to be determined.

Concord, the tournament’s 12th seed, had the tying run on third base with two outs in the bottom of the seventh. A ball was lined into left field, and McCoy originally broke in on it before realizing it was going to go over his head.

His desperation leap allowed his glove to just glance the ball, popping it up slowly into the air. As McCoy fell to the ground, he contorted his body to put his glove under the ball, snagging it before it hit the ground on his second catch attempt.

“I had to make it interesting,” the senior said, laughing. “I knew I couldn’t drop it. That was the only thing going through my head, ‘Don’t drop it, don’t drop it.’ I just stuck with it.”

It capped a stressful seventh inning which saw the Senators use three pitchers and plenty of traffic on the base paths.

Freshman Hunter Chambers began the inning for his seventh inning of work by walking the first two. But he picked the first runner off and struck out the third batter before he reached his pitch count and had to be removed from the game.

Cole Greene faced one batter, issuing a walk, and Gordon called upon Connor McPhail for the next at-bat. The Raiders executed a double steal to move both runners into scoring position, trailing 6-4.

A run scored when Dover looked to have the runner picked off at second base, but he escaped a rundown to third as the lead runner crossed the plate. That set the stage for McCoy’s heroics.

“I told him if he still had that infielder’s glove there’s no way he catches that,” Gordon said. “He stuck with it and the umpire stuck with it too. It was a great play and a great call.”

Chambers pitched all the way to the single-game pitch count limit for the second time all year. He shook off a pair of unearned runs in the first inning to go all the way to the final inning.

He struck out four — including all three outs in the bottom of the sixth.

“Later in the game I settled in a little more,” Chambers said. “I got the nerves out I guess and everything was working better.”

“Once he settled in, we said it was his game,” Gordon said. “We’ve kind of chopped it up all year but you can’t move on unless you get this done. We didn’t want to play around with it. He did a great job and I’m really proud of him. He’s a freshman but this is his 20th game on varsity. He plays everyday and he definitely earned some more stripes today.”

Sir William Bauer had the biggest hit of the day offensively for the Senators.

Bauer came up in the fifth with the game tied 2-2 and the bases loaded with nobody out. He laced a hard grounder up the middle which plated a pair of runs. Austin Turner was next up and also singled before Leondre Brittingham blooped an opposite field single down the third base line to score the third run of the inning for Dover.

The Senators added what proved to be a key insurance run in the seventh when Chambers and Bauer led off with back-to-back singles. Chambers’ courtesy runner, Joell Gray, later scored on a passed ball.

Marquise Guy recorded a RBI single in the second inning while Turner provided a sacrifice fly for a RBI. Chambers went 4-for-4 at the plate with a double to lead the Dover offense and Bauer was 2-for-3.

While wins in the state tournament are nothing new for the Dover program, this year’s edition is the first taste for many of the varsity players as the 2020 season was canceled due to the COVID-10 pandemic.

The Senators only had a handful of players with starting experience on the varsity level at the beginning of the year, with four freshmen and four sophomores on varsity this season.

“At the beginning of the year, the veteran kids had a talk with the new kids to let them know how everything was going to work out,” said Guy, one of Dover’s seniors. “We just did a lot of team bonding during the year and kept building chemistry every game. It’s great we’re still in this playing. A lot of schools were doubting us, thinking we wouldn’t even make it here at this point. For us to keep working hard, it’s great to be here.”

“We scratched and clawed to get kids who wanted to play baseball this year,” Gordon said. “We struggled filling a JV team but still made a little bit of a season down there. But it’s great to see the kids come out and believe in themselves. Early in the year there was some doubt, I told them to stick with me and they did. Here we are, headed into the third round.”

The Senators were 3-7 on April 27 but have gone 7-2 since then and have a chance to reach the quarterfinals on Saturday.

“Everything came together and we started playing as a team,” McCoy said. “We’re playing for Dover. We had to find a way to make things work, and things are working now. We didn’t have a season last year and here we are, just got to make the best of it.”