 "Photo: Gabrielle Schrurluff")
 "Photo: Kim Shelpman")
The 13 seniors on the UCF Baseball team made the most of their final regular season series, taking two of three from Houston to clinch the eighth and final spot in the Conference USA Tournament.
The Knights honored the team’s seniors before Saturday’s regular season finale, then took the field and secured their place in the tournament, which starts Wednesday in Hattiesburg, Miss.
Seniors Caleb Graham, Jaager Good and Kyle Sweat started against the Cougars, each making it through at least five innings in their respective starts.
Sweat was a little erratic in his start Saturday, but he kept the Houston batters off-balance, allowing one hit and one walk in five innings of work to get his third victory of the season.
“I was tired, my arm was dragging,” he said after Saturday’s 4-1 victory. “That’s why I kept leaving the balls up. But if there’s a will, there’s a way.”
There was reason for Sweat to be tired. Saturday’s appearance was Sweat’s second time on the mound during the series. He was called on to close out the victory in the series opener, pitching the final 1.1 innings in relief of Graham.
“I’ve asked that guy to do so much for us in the last couple weeks,” UCF head coach Terry Rooney said. “… A couple weeks ago I talked to Kyle and said ‘Kyle, listen, we’re gonna need you to close some games out, and, depending on the amount of pitches, bring you back on Sunday.’ ”
The Knights jumped on the board first in the series finale, scoring 2 runs in the bottom of the second on doubles from Chris Duffy and senior Colin Arnold.
Duffy added another RBI double in the fifth, and senior shortstop Eric Kallstrom finished up the Knights’ scoring three batters later, bringing home Duffy in the same frame.
When Kallstrom led off the bottom of the eighth, he said he took some time for himself to think about what would be his final at bat at Jay Bergman Field.
“I had a little moment right before stepping in the box,” he said, “thinking that this is going to be my last at bat, I was just going to take a hack at the first pitch I saw.”
Kallstrom slapped the first offering from Houston’s Mo Wiley past the shortstop for a single, finishing his final regular season with a hit.
“Besides having the time of my life and meeting some of probably my best friends that I’ll have the rest of my life, I think I developed tremendously as a person and as a player,” Kallstrom said, “and that’s a credit to the coaching that’s been around here.”
Although Saturday was Senior Day, Friday was the final regular season start for Good, who finished his tumultuous career with a 6-3 loss.
Good got Blake Kelso to ground out to start the game, but he followed that with a four-pitch walk to Zak Presley. Presley stole second, and Good walked the next batter, Caleb Ramsey.
Good followed the walk with a blunder of a throwing error.
Good attempted a pickoff to second and caught Presley off the bag. Presley broke for third, and as Good ran toward the base, his toss to third baseman Jake Huxtable sailed over Huxtable’s head and rolled into foul territory.
Presley scored and Ramsey advanced to third. He scored on a wild pitch one batter later.
“Since last night, this game has been running through my head,” Good said after Friday’s game. “Last outing at UCF. I felt great in the bullpen, hit all my spots, but you get out to the mound and it’s a completely different monster. Adrenaline gets pumping, you start thinking about different things.”
But Good bounced back, shutting out the Cougars in the second, third and fourth innings.
“It was more of me realizing that this is my last year,” Good said. “No matter what happens on the mound, I just gotta be a bulldog and battle as hard as I can, every pitch, every out.”
After Houston scored once in the top of the fifth, the Knights responded in their half of the frame when Huxtable hit a 2-run home run, his third of the season.
UCF scored once more in the sixth, but couldn’t rebound from its pitching woes and miscues. Of the six runs Houston scored, only one was earned.
In the series opener Thursday, Graham lasted deep into the night, allowing 3 runs on seven hits in 7.2 innings in the 8-4 victory.
Freshman catcher Beau Taylor had three hits and two RBIs, and senior first baseman Kiko Vazquez — who finished his final series with four hits — was 2 for 2 with an RBI.
The outing was the longest of Graham’s career, and the victory gave UCF a half game lead on the Memphis Tigers for the final spot in the conference tournament.
The Tigers were swept by East Carolina, the team UCF will face Wednesday at 5 p.m.
And even though the Knights finished 9-15 in conference play — the most wins for the school in C-USA — Rooney said he expects his team to compete in the tournament.
“I told the team, listen, you woke up a lot of people,” he said Saturday. “By the way we play the game, every team in this conference knows that we’re coming ready to play.”
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