Gladbrook-Reinbeck’s Will Kiburis tags out Grundy Center’s Brayden Davie (5) at the plate in the fifth inning of Monday’s second game of an NICL West doubleheader in Grundy Center. G-R catcher Nick Tscherter recovered a passed ball to relay to Kiburis for the out. PHOTO BY JAKE RYDER

GRUNDY CENTER – Gladbrook-Reinbeck baseball bounced back to split a doubleheader with Grundy Center this past Monday with a 6-2 victory in the nightcap at the George Wilhelm Sports Complex.

The Spartans won the opener, 2-1, but both teams finished with two losses in the division, splitting the title by rule. Grundy Center had won two of the three games in the series this season after a 3-0 win in Reinbeck on May 25.

Nevertheless, it is Gladbrook-Reinbeck’s first time earning at least a share of the top of the NICL West standings since 2010. G-R moved to 21-11 overall and Grundy Center to 15-6 — both teams finished with 10-2 records in the West.

“We’ll take a tie any day,” G-R coach Scott Kiburis. “They’re a really good program with some good veteran players and some good young talent out there too, so it was nice to tie up as conference champions.”

G-R senior William Kiburis struck out nine batters and didn’t allow a hit until the fourth inning. He scattered three hits in total with two earned runs and four walks in six and two-thirds innings pitched.

He also created several outs through a pickoff move, catching another Grundy Center runner in a rundown and throwing out another runner that tried to beat a wild pitch home to the plate.

“When he needed to get outs, he got outs,” Scott Kiburis said. “He made some intelligent plays and that was big for us. He was excited to pitch with a lead and got us down to that last out.”

G-R started fast in the second game with four runs in the first two innings, including two RBIs for Nick Tscherter and one for Caleb Egesdal. Egesdal added an RBI in the fourth and Isaac Clark tacked on an insurance run in the seventh.

“We worked on a couple of walks in that second game and were pretty good on the bases,” Scott Kiburis said. “And we were able to take advantage of when we had runners on to make it a bit more comfortable on our defense.”

The first game featured two pitchers that worked fast, with Tate Jirovsky coming out on top with a complete game performance, striking out eight batters with only one walk and one earned run allowed on three hits. Nick Tscherter walked none with two earned runs on six hits and three strikeouts.

“We’ve got Tate, they’ve got Will and we knew we wanted to split those guys up,” Grundy coach Patrick Brown Jr. said. “We were struggling a bit at first and then our guys got confident at the plate and teed up there. We left seven on base but we did what we had to do to win the game.”

Brown Jr. did offer a critique of the NICL standings format, which follows other sports in the league in not going to other criteria in determining a true champion — baseball and softball are the only two NICL sports that play a three-game series between the teams, all others follow a “home-and-away” format.

“It’s not fair to say this about G-R, because they’re a really good baseball team, but I do have a little bit of an issue with the share when you beat somebody two out of three times,” Brown Jr. said. “Something’s got to determine a tiebreaker and nobody’s gonna convince me or anybody on our team that we’re not [outright] conference champions.

“But once we got that win to be conference champions, co-conference champions, whatever you want to call it, I think we were able to settle in and do well in game two.”

The combination of Kiburis and some “freshmen-type mistakes” on the basepaths spelled doom for the Spartans’ hope of an outright claim.

“It easily could’ve been a 5-4 ballgame,” Brown Jr. said. “Too many walks, too many mistakes.”

However, this is the third consecutive season where the Spartans have earned at least a share of the NICL West — they shared with East Marshall in 2021 and won it outright in 2022.

“It’s becoming part of the program where we’re not just beating NICL West teams, but East and Central too,” Brown Jr. said. “It wasn’t that long ago we were just trying to win a game, and now we’re contending for the conference. It’s a great place to be.”

Grundy Center hosts its senior night on Tuesday against Union Community and then travels to Hudson on Wednesday — the Knights and the Pirates will play each other on Saturday for the right to meet Grundy again in a 2A District 4 quarterfinal on Wednesday, July 5.

Gladbrook-Reinbeck is at home against Jesup for the regular-season home finale and hits the road at Denver and Dunkerton on Wednesday and Thursday. They start the postseason at home on Saturday against H-L-V at 5 p.m. in the first game of a 1A-4 district doubleheader — GMG and Montezuma will follow.