COLBY, Kansas — The Cloud County Community College baseball team split Saturday's road doubleheader against Colby Community College — winning 12-6 in Game Three before falling 19-11 in the series finale — to earn its third straight KJCCC West series win.

Cloud County (17-14 overall, 12-8 KJCCC), after sweeping the first two games of the series on Thursday in Concordia, used two huge innings to put away Colby (19-15 overall, 10-6 KJCCC) in the first game on Saturday, rolling to a 12-6 victory.

The T-Birds took a 4-1 lead with a four-run third inning, three of which came across on a 3-run home run by sophomore first baseman Ryan Krolikowski, who continued his torment of the Trojans after going 6-for-6 at the plate on Thursday.

"Game Three was a gutsy one knowing we were going to get Colby's best shot after the sweep on Thursday," said Cloud County head coach, Eric Gilliland. "Colby scored first, but we came back with that four-spot. Krolikowski hit an absolute missile through the wind and hit the batters' eye in center field. Every time Colby scored, we were able to score more and answer."

Cloud County led by as many as nine runs after a six-run top of the fifth inning that ballooned its lead to 10-1.

The T-Birds made the Trojans pay for three hit batsman and a walk in the inning as all four free passes came around to score.

Freshman outfielder Ed Scott worked an RBI walk to get the scoring started. Redshirt freshman Aidan Huggins drove in two with a single, sophomore Luis Landaeta followed with an RBI single, and sophomore Tucker Catlett launched his first home run of the season — a two-run shot — to cap the inning.

"The name of the game is eliminating reasons for losing and not making those types of mistakes and when another team does you have to make them pay," Gilliland said. "That's exactly what happened that inning and then Tucker went and got the big blast. In the first game (Saturday), we just refused to let the momentum swing to their side."

Colby made a game of things with five runs of its own in the bottom half of the fifth to make it 10-6, but the T-Birds answered right back with a pair of runs in the sixth on a Dario DeSantis RBI walk and RBI hit-by-pitch for Catlett.

Redshirt freshman Neil Sudbeck then polished off the victory for the T-Birds with 2 1/3 innings of work out of the bullpen, limiting the Trojans to just one hit the rest of the way.

Unfortunately for the T-Birds, they were unable to complete the sweep in Game Four as Colby was able to salvage a game by winning a 19-11 rollercoaster affair in the finale.

The two teams combined for 35 hits and three lead changes before the Trojans, who were up 12-11 heading to the bottom of the fifth, strung together three runs in the fifth, three in the six, and one in the seventh to pull away.

"It was a weird game and a total circus," said Gilliland of Game Four. "It finished in about 22-degree weather. It was ugly. I told the guys after 'We're going to act like that didn't happen.' We showed some fight to get back in the game, and we did some good things in that game, but it was just one of those wild games where we couldn't stop the bleeding."

Sophomore outfielder Ryan Simons, Krolikowski, Landaeta and Erik Sabrowski all tallied two hits in the finale to pace the T-Birds.

Sabrowski hammered a two-run, opposite-field home run in the bottom of the second inning to briefly give the T-Birds a 6-5 lead. The long ball was Sabrowski's team-leading seventh home run of the season.

The T-Birds will now take a short break from KJCCC West action as they begin a stretch of seven straight non-conference games this Wednesday on the road against Hastings College JV. Game times are tentatively scheduled for 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.