Iowa City Liberty surprised the state by clinching a spot in the 2026 state baseball tournament with upset wins and a complete 180 during the regular season.
In the state quarterfinal matchup on Tuesday, July 21, against the 40-2 No. 1 seed Sioux City East Black Raiders, the Lightning held their own.
Liberty battled until the absolute end, not giving in until the last strike of the game. The 6-5 Lightning loss wasn’t a fluke performance — this is how they had been playing the final months ot their seasons.
“It hurts; we have to look back and think about what we need to do to be able to compete with these guys,” Liberty coach Uby Martinez said about his team’s performance. “We don’t have an indoor hitting facility for us to hit in — that would benefit us. We start slow a lot of times.”
“We can’t control that, but what we can control is how hard we play and how hard we work, and the crowd appreciates that,” he said.
Liberty had Sioux City East sweating all night. From when the Lightning tied the game at 2-2 in the third, or trailed 4-3 in the top of the fourth, or added two runs in the bottom of the seventh, making it 6-5, they had the crowd thinking, “Can they do it again?”
From 11-straight losses to a season-changing win streak, the Lightning, in their fourth state appearance since the school opened in 2017, saw growth in the program.
Six of the nine Lightning starters came away with a hit on Tuesday. The final game of the day started at 8:50 p.m. and played well into the Cedar Rapids night.
A heavy underdog, the crowd dressed in purple and black made the short trip from Iowa City and were very much heard all game, giving Liberty a momentum lift it occasionally needed, even entering the seventh when the Lightning were down to their final three outs.
Following an early 2-0 first inning lead, the Lightning, off a James O’Connor double, tied the game 2-2. Liberty challenged Sioux City East, forced a mound visit and put pressure on the Black Raiders.
But Sioux City East would retake the lead immediately following the two runs from the Lightning.
Sioux City East would add on, as Western Kentucky commit Cal Jepsen tripled to right field, making it 5-3. Jepsen came around to score, making it 6-3, and from then on Bohdy Colling finished the rest.
Just when the game was down to the last out, here came Liberty. Reece Rettig singled to start the bottom of the seventh, then Evan Schmierer doubled, advancing Rettig to third.
Drew Turgasen would then have possibly the biggest hit of his sophomore season with a double that scored two runs, making it 6-5. But a strikeout ended the frame and the Lightning’s turnaround season.
“That’s a really good team,” Sioux City East head coach Trevor Miller said. “I heard from a couple coaches that this was the hottest team in the state coming into the tournament, and they fought to the very last pitch and had us on our heels.”
Sioux City continues its impressive season, winning 34 of its last 35 games and has now won nine in a row,
But this season, and the performance in the last two to three weeks from Iowa City Liberty, have the program trending towards new heights.
This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: Iowa City Liberty falls to SC East in Iowa baseball state quarterfinal
