Four walk-offs. A 44-game streak. A 20-inning Thursday. The Big Red turned grit and a packed house full of believers into the first baseball championship in program history.
There’s a moment every fanbase lives for — the one where the season hangs on a single swing and the whole stadium leans in together. Denison baseball got theirs on June 4 in Eastlake, Ohio, and the people who’d traveled to see it weren’t disappointed.
With the score tied 3-3 in the bottom of the 10th, runners on first and second and nobody out, junior Jake Lutte ripped a line drive off the right-field wall. Kelly Crittenberger raced home from second, the bench emptied, and the Big Red had their first NCAA Division III national championship — a 4-3 win over Endicott in the decisive third game of the College World Series.
Lutte, who’d once found himself buried at the bottom of a freshman-year dogpile, was more than happy to take that punishment again — this time as the guy who ended it.
It was Denison’s fourth walk-off win of the World Series run. If you needed one image to sum up this team, that’s it: never out of it, always one swing from bedlam.
A grind, not a coronation
Don’t let the trophy fool you into thinking this was easy. Thursday alone was more than six hours and roughly 20 innings of baseball.
Denison had cruised in the series opener, beating Endicott 6-0 on Wednesday behind seven sharp innings from Cooper Marrs — a Riverside-Brookfield (Ill.) grad who scattered four hits, struck out seven, and walked nobody on his way to all-tournament honors. But Endicott refused to fold. In Thursday’s first game, they clawed back from 6-2 and 8-6 deficits to outlast the Big Red 11-10 in 10 innings, forcing a winner-take-all finale just minutes later.
That second game might have stung worse if not for Cade Nowik, who put together one of the great individual performances in program history — three home runs and seven RBIs in a single tournament game. Nowik was named the World Series Most Valuable Player.
Then came the decider, and the Big Red did what they’d done all postseason: they dug out of a hole. Down 3-0, Max Fishbein lit the fuse with a fifth-inning home run — Denison’s first hit of the game. Eron Vega and Erik Sundgren each drove in a run in the sixth to tie it. And first-year Devin Parker delivered the outing of the night, tossing 7⅓ scoreless innings in relief on 109 pitches, surrendering just two hits to keep the game alive long enough for Lutte’s heroics.
It wasn’t a role Parker had been groomed for — the situation simply demanded it, and Deegan wasn’t about to take the ball out of his hands.
The comeback team
If “rally” is your thing, this team was built for it.
Denison finished 51-3 and ripped off an NCAA Division III record-tying 44-game winning streak. They never had a single losing streak all year. That streak finally snapped at the worst possible moment — a 5-1 loss to East Texas Baptist in their World Series opener on May 29 — and yet the Big Red became the first D-III team in 26 years to drop its first game at the World Series site and still win the whole thing. (Montclair State was the last to pull it off, back in 2000.)
This was a team that prided itself on bouncing back, and even after the brutal Game 2 walk-off loss to Endicott, nobody in the dugout doubted they’d take the finale.
The mindset traces back to the offseason. Denison graduated star pitcher Nick Falter and lost three more players to the transfer portal, and plenty of people outside the program wondered if the Big Red were tapped out. The team answered with a two-word rallying cry that became a hashtag: Not Just Yet. Don’t count us out until we’ve had our shot.
Fueled by the faithful
This is where Denison’s run hits different. Championships are won on the field — but they’re powered in the stands.
Hundreds of Big Red fans made the trip to suburban Cleveland, including a busload straight from campus. At least 40 former Denison baseball players showed up too, some flying in from as far as California, packing the lower deck beside the dugout. The team’s presence was so big that stadium vendors blew through their entire allotment of 200 World Series Denison T-shirts.
When it was over, Deegan didn’t keep the trophy to himself. He carried it up into the stands so the alumni — the guys who’d helped build the foundation years earlier — could touch a little of the glory they’d set in motion.
It fit the way Deegan talks about the difference between a team and a program. A team, he figures, turns inward and gets selfish; a program links up and builds something he likes to call an unbreakable bond.
That bond is the whole point. Fans, alumni, athletes, all pulling in the same direction — that’s what turns a good season into a generational one.
A golden era in Granville
The baseball title wasn’t even Denison’s only championship this year. It was the Big Red’s third NCAA crown of the 2025-26 season, joining the men’s swimming and diving team and the women’s basketball team. That makes Denison one of just three Division III programs nationwide — alongside Tufts and Wisconsin-La Crosse — to win three or more NCAA titles in a single academic year, out of 426 D-III schools.
Deegan, who’s been methodically building this thing since 2013, was quick to spread the credit beyond the dugout.
His take: coaches may win games, but it’s administrations that win championships — and Denison’s, he says, gives the program the resources to compete at the highest level.
In Eastlake, the proof was in the dogpile — exhausted players sprinting across the diamond, a fanbase roaring, alumni reaching down from the stands. Denison didn’t just win a national title. They showed what happens when a whole community decides, together, that this is the year.
Not just yet? Try right now.
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