Can You Believe What These Owatonna Teams All Did on the Same Day?
Owatonna High School baseball, boys' lacrosse and girls' lacrosse were all declared Big Nine Conference champions on Friday, May 18, making it one of the best days in OHS spring sports history. Two of them had actually clinched earlier, but no one knew until Friday.
In this shortened, winter-wouldn't-give-up spring sports prep season, the Big Nine Conference changed the method on how the lacrosse conference standings were calculated. Instead of using both head-to-head meetings between the six teams in the conference, only the first one counted. This was only announced on Friday.
So while the Owatonna boys were beating Rochester Century on Senior Night Friday 15-3 to 'win the conference title outright,' they actually had already secured the title with their 6-5 victory over Northfield on Wednesday, May 9. The Huskies went 5-0 in the official conference standings.
The Owatonna girls' lacrosse team captured its second league title in three years, sharing the honor with Mankato with 4-1 records. The Huskies beat Mankato, but lost to Rochester John Marshall in the official conference games. OHS topped Northfield 11-1 on Friday, May 11 which was actually the date they clinched the title. The Huskies have lost to Mankato and defeated Rochester Century since then in non-conference games.
The regular season wraps up this week for the lacrosse teams.
It's a little more straight forward for the baseball team. Owatonna's 10-0 win over second-place Winona Friday wrapped up the outright Big Nine title, their first since 2014. Owatonna (9-1 Big Nine, 15-3 overall) plays a league game at Red Wing Monday at 5 pm on Kat Kountry 105FM. Winona and Mayo each have three conference losses already. Only the first meeting of the season between teams counted for the Big Nine standings. Playoffs begin Saturday, May 26 for the Huskies.
So it sounds cool to say Owatonna won three conference titles on Friday, but that's not quite the reality of it.