Teammates wait for Keenan Webb as he rounds third and heads home after his two-run homer in the first inning in the second game of Friday's doubleheader.

TIFTON — Tift County ended the regular season with a 5-4 win over the Colquitt County Packers, salvaging a split in a Friday doubleheader.

Unfortunately for Tift, the win will likely have to be used as a building block. As the second game moved into the bottom of the fifth inning, Camden County put the finishing touches on a 3-0 victory over Lowndes, essentially ending the Blue Devils’ chances at the state playoffs.

Tift and Colquitt both entered with postseason aspirations. Tift needed at least one win and two losses by Camden to make state as the third seed from the region. Colquitt needed a sweep of Tift and for Camden to win both games over Lowndes to win the region championship. Neither got what they wanted. Lowndes sealed up the Region 1 title with a 6-1 victory in the opener with Camden.

Colquitt will be the second seed for Region 1 in state and Camden goes as the No. 3. Tift technically still has a chance to go in as the fourth seed through the Georgia High School Association’s power ratings, but as of Saturday morning, the Blue Devils ranked behind three teams for the final slot.

“It was a good one for us moving forward,” said Tift head coach Kyle Kirk, whose team won their 10th game of the year in the nightcap. Kirk praised the leadership throughout the season of his five senior players. “I’d hoped that I’d get to coach them one more week,” he said.

One of that group of five, Keenan Webb, crushed a two-run home run in the first inning of the second game, boosting Tift’s lead to 5-0. As it turned out, they needed every inch of the first inning explosion.

Mason Avant pitched six innings for the Devils. He surrendered a single run in the second inning and kept the Packers from crossing the plate until he ran into trouble in the sixth. In that frame, Jaycee Harden and Mack Crosby produced RBI doubles and Alex Bledsoe cut the lead to 5-4 on a single that plated Reece Bledsoe, Crosby’s courtesy runner.

But after intentionally walking Gavin Patel to load the bases with two outs, Avant got a ground ball to second base to end the inning.

More trouble came in the sixth on a one-out double. However, with a runner at third and two outs, Owen Manning went to his knees to field a ground ball and made a strong throw to Webb at first to keep Tift ahead.

Joseph Pittman pitched a 1-2-3 seventh inning for the save.

With the potential for state on the line, Tift began the second game on fire.

The first six batters reached base, five of them scoring.

A single by Keshaun Mays and Will Weeks reaching base after being plunked by a Cory Newsome pitch put two men on base for Avant, who delivered an RBI single. Manning followed with a double to bring home two more.

That brought up Webb, who sent a shot over the left field fence. It was his second homer of the season and extended the lead to 5-0.

Newsome settled down after the first, allowing the Devils just two more hits, but the run difference proved a bit too much for the Packers to overcome.

COLQUITT 9, TIFT 0

The Packers scored four runs in the fourth inning en route to a 9-0 triumph in Friday’s opener.

Pittman threw three and one-third innings and surrendered two earned runs. His night was one of the many positives Kirk saw for 2019.

“He has pitched extremely well the last two weeks,” Kirk said.

Gavin Patel went 4-for-4 for Colquitt, drove in two runs and scored twice. The Pack had no extra-base hits in the game, but took advantage of five Tift errors, five walks and two batters hit by a pitch.

Dylan Collins limited the Blue Devils to five hits. Avant reached third base in the second inning and Ben Brock did so in the fourth after beating out an infield hit. The fourth was Tift’s best chance to score when they loaded the bases with one out. Collins induced a double play ground ball to end the threat.

“Two years in a row we didn’t meet our goal (of making state),” said Kirk. “We’ll keep fighting.”