Penn Cambria edged in tourney’s first round

By RON BRACKEN
For The Tribune-Democrat

PHILIPSBURG May 16, 2008 12:14 am

— They’re just pups but Luke Curtis and Drew Bryan have proven they can run with the big dogs.
And because they can, Philipsburg-Osceola will continue in the District 6 Class AA baseball playoffs after edging Penn Cambria 3-2 at the Don Womer Baseball Complex Thursday in a first-round game.
Curtis, a sophomore, pitched a five-hitter and struck out 14 Panthers to get the win.
Bryan, a freshman, is a late-season call-up to replace injured Tim Gray and all he did against Penn Cambria was line a two-out single to right-center to drive in the game-winning run in the bottom of the seventh.
The fifth-seeded Mounties will visit Richland in a quarterfinal game Monday at 4 p.m., and it took Bryan’s hit to get them there.
“All week long we’ve been saying that all we wanted was to have a chance at the end and we had that,” said Penn Cambria coach Jim Ronan. “The kids played their hearts out. We knew we were going against a kid (Curtis) who had been dominant all year and it was going to be difficult to score against him. We knew we weren’t going to get two or three consecutive hits off him. So we tried to manufacture some things. We had runners in scoring position early and we just couldn’t get a hit.”