As the ball rocketed off junior Mike Bivas’ bat and middler Adam Morgan sprinted for home plate, 20 black jerseys mobbed the field in celebration of a national championship.

The club baseball team, in its fifth year of competition, capped a nearly-perfect 2010 season with a 5-4 extra inning victory Penn State in the championship game of the National Club Baseball Association (NCBA) Division II World Series in Johnstown, Pa May 25.

The Huskies’ speedy rise from inception to champion may seem like a Cinderella story to observers, but not to the members of the team.

“To be honest, I couldn’t see it going any other way,” said catcher Nate Hodor, an electrical engineering major who graduated in May. “We couldn’t imagine not going out with a national championship this season. It sounds really cocky – and that’s not what we’re about – but we knew how talented our whole team was, and we wouldn’t have expected anything less.”

Hodor was around for the team’s humble beginning in fall 2005. When the petition to form the team was approved by the school, he and and other students heard about open tryouts for the squad.

Recently graduated business major Nick Young, a pitcher, can remember when he first heard about the team.

“I saw a kid in my dorm walking around with his baseball stuff and I just asked him about it,” Young said. “He said they were trying to form a club team and they were having tryouts.”

Hodor and Young were two of more than 100 students who showed up at the first tryout, and two of the 20 players who ultimately made final cuts. Like most players on the team, Hodor said baseball is his passion.

“People usually come to Northeastern for the education, not so much the athletics,” Hodor said. “All of us still wanted to continue playing at a high level of baseball. Basically, everybody on our team was a high school all-star who chose academics over athletics for college.”

In the team’s first season of competition in fall 2006, NU went 10-2 and reached the New England Club Baseball Association (NECBA) championship game, but lost to Emmanuel College. For the next three seasons the squad dominated the NECBA, racking up a three–year record of 35-7 with three consecutive championship victories. Fifteen players were named to the NECBA all-star teams, and five players took home league MVP honors.
Young said he credits the team’s success to its cohesion on and off the field.

“We have really good team chemistry,” Young said. “I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to win so much. Everyone just gets along, we don’t take it too seriously. We have a good time with it, [and] enjoy playing.”

With three NECBA titles behind them, team members made the decision to move up to the nationally-competitive NCBA this spring. A new league didn’t change the team’s winning ways as the Huskies qualified for the NCBA District II playoffs. The team dismissed Fordham University 3-2 and 10-6 in a two-game set May 8 to qualify for the World Series at Point Stadium in Johnstown.

As the fifth-seed in the eight-team bracket, NU took out the fourth seed Western State College of Colorado 10-2 May 21, then eliminated the top seed William & Mary 10-5 two days later. A 6-3 victory over eighth-seeded Rice University May 24 set up a title game with the seventh-seeded Nittany Lions May 25.

The Huskies held a 1-0 lead through five innings until Penn State took the lead with two runs in the top of the sixth inning. Bivas, a junior architecture major, doubled in the bottom half of the frame and later scored on a wild pitch to tie it 2-2. With nothing settled after the seventh inning, the last in club baseball matches, the championship headed into extra innings.

The Nittany Lions took a 4-2 lead by scoring twice in the top of the eighth inning, leaving Northeastern with its last at-bats. Hodor came through with a bases-loaded double to drive in two runs and tie the game, setting the stage for Bivas’ walkoff single that scored Morgan, a middler engineering major. Sophomore business major Jeremy Gordon was named World Series MVP by going 8-11 and driving in four runs in the tournament. Young picked up two wins as a pitcher in the tournament, including the win in relief in the title game.

“All year, we’ve been behind and we’ve always battled back,” Gordon told Johnstown’s newspaper, The Tribune-Democrat, after the victory. “That’s what this team stands for. There wasn’t a doubt in anybody’s mind when we went down that we were going to come back.”

The late-inning magic is exactly the way Hodor said he would like to end his tenure playing on the team.

“That’s the way you want to go out,” Hodor said.