OMAHA, Neb. (WNCN) – The dream of the first NCAA championship in program history ended abruptly for the University of North Carolina baseball team on Tuesday.
The Tar Heels fell to Florida State in a season-ending 9-5 loss in Omaha, officially eliminating UNC from the 2024 Men’s College World Series. This is the second defeat that UNC suffered in the double-elimination tournament after Sunday’s loss to top-ranked Tennessee.
Connor Hults pitched 4 1/3 innings of shutout relief to thwart North Carolina’s comeback bid, and Jaxson West and Max Williams hit back-to-back homers in the ninth for insurance.
Florida State will now advance to play against No. 1 Tennessee on Wednesday afternoon. The Seminoles will have to win over the Volunteers twice to move on to the CWS championship series for the first time since 1999.
The Tar Heels (48-16) lost consecutive games for the first time since mid-April and went 1-2 in their first CWS since 2018.
“We had one of the best teams in the country and our goal was to win this whole thing,” the Tar Heels’ Casey Cook said. “The postseason, we didn’t hit how we necessarily wanted to. We didn’t get what we wanted, but we have zero regrets. We gave everything we had.”
Though they play in the same conference, North Carolina and Florida State had not faced each other on the baseball diamond since 2022, when the Tar Heels swept the Seminoles in Chapel Hill.
Florida State led 3-1 after chasing both Aidan Haugh (4-3) and Matthew Matthijs in the third inning. The Tar Heels called on Dalton Pence, who extended his NCAA Tournament shutout innings streak to 14 1/3 innings before five singles in six at-bats led to four runs in the fifth inning, giving the Seminoles a 7-1 lead.
North Carolina scored four runs in the bottom half. With two runners on, Vance Honeycutt greeted Conner Whittaker with his fourth homer in five games, and Jackson Van De Brake followed with an RBI single to make it a two-run game.
“That’s how the team has been all year — no quit,” Honeycutt said. “That’s a credit to how we’re trained, how we’re coached and the character of the guys in the locker room.”
Hults (3-1) got the last out of the inning and retired 12 of 15 batters in his longest outing of the season. He never was in trouble. Honeycutt singled leading off the seventh, but was erased in a rundown between first and second. After Van De Brake doubled in the eighth, Hults coaxed two groundouts. He walked Alex Madera to start the ninth, but sandwiched a strikeout between two groundouts to end the game.
West, the No. 9 batter for FSU, had a career-high four hits in five at-bats. His homer was his second in four games and just his third of the season.
Williams hit his fifth homer in eight NCAA Tournament games and has 14 for the season.