East Franklin baseball team captures Franklin County Tournament crown

The East Franklin Junior High School baseball team captured the Franklin County tournament title with wins over Tharptown and Phil Campbell on Saturday, besting the Wildcats 8-1 before walking it off against Phil Campbell for the county crown.

“Those kids deserved it,” East Franklin head coach David Ward said. “They worked hard all year.”

The Rebels, who outscored Tharptown 22-3 in two wins earlier in the week, emphatically dispatched the Wildcats, allowing just two hits in their first game of the tournament. Issac Duboise got the start on the mound for the Rebels and struck out eight of the nine batters he faced in his three innings of work. Miles Duboise came in in relief to finish out the last two innings.

“You know we’ve had great pitching all year and we had some great pitching on Saturday,” Ward said. “Isaac Duboise started for us and he did what he normally does.”

East Franklin, led by a three-RBI performance from Eli Baker, scored in all but the final inning of the game. The Rebels opened the scoring with an RBI single by Baker in the first, and then a Tharptown error and a single by Miles Duboise scored B.B. Garrison and Jonah Stancil to make it 3-0. Half of East Franklin’s eight runs came in the third inning. A single by Kye Baker and a double by Isaac Duboise got the inning started while walks and Wildcat errors did the rest. The Rebels’ final run of the game came in the form of an RBI groundout by Eli Baker to score Kye Baker from third base.

“We swung the bats well and we jumped on (Tharptown) pretty good,” Ward said. “We swung the bats well all day and ran the bases really well all day.”

In the championship game, East Franklin faced off against one of the only two teams to beat the Rebels this season, Phil Campbell. East Franklin’s last loss came at the hands of the Bobcats back on March 21 when the two teams split in a doubleheader. With that, the championship game was more or less the season’s rubber match between the two teams.

“We knew it would be a tough game,” Ward said. “(Phil Campbell) brought some kids down that were pretty good, too.”

The championship was a back-and-forth affair. East Franklin got the scoring started in the bottom of the first inning when a wild pitch on a strike three that would’ve ended the inning allowed Hallman and Miles Duboise to score from third. Phil Campbell took a 2-1 lead in the top of the fourth when an error scored Shooter Motes and Cody Sneed came in on a passed ball before the final out was recorded.

East Franklin and Phil Campbell then proceeded to swap back-to-back three-run half innings. The Rebels retook the lead in the bottom of the fourth thanks to three straight walks with the bases loaded, all three runs coming with two outs. Momentum then swung back to the Bobcats in the top half of the next inning when an RBI single by Jack Owens, a ground out RBI by Motes, and a sacrifice fly by Kruz Cochran made it 5-4, Phil Campbell.

Down a run in the bottom of the fifth, the Rebels needed to score to keep the game alive and they did just that, when Kye Baker was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded. Level at 5-5, the game went into extra innings. A Phil Campbell single and then a walk with two outs put the go-ahead run on second base, but Miles Duboise, who came in in relief of Issac Duboise, got out of the jam with a ground out fielder’s choice.

“They had a chance to win, we had a chance to win, they had a chance to win—back and forth,” Ward said.

East Franklin wasted no time in the bottom of the sixth. Eli Baker led off and reached on a single before Eric Gutierrez came in to pinch run for him. Braylin Hallman was next up at the plate and his one hit of the game proved to be the most important. Hallman’s hit, a hard ground ball into right field, sent Gutierrez running and an error by the right fielder allowed Gutierrez to come all away around for the walk-off run.

“Eli Baker gets a big base hit and then Hallman came through and gets a base hit behind the runner,” Ward said. “The right fielder goes to throw it in and I just sent (Gutierrez) home to score the winning run—thank goodness.”

“I just took the chance,” Ward added.

The county tournament championship was the finale in a 2024 campaign that saw East Franklin finish 16-2 overall. From within there were high expectations of what the team could achieve, but the Rebels still felt they had something to prove.

“People still think we’re that East Franklin team that’s not as good as everyone else, but we want to prove that we’re the best,” East Franklin assistant coach Trey Benford said earlier in the season.

On Saturday, the Rebels did just that.