The reigning Great American Conference baseball champion, the University of Arkansas at Monticello, is returning to the GAC tournament looking to defend its title.
The Boll Weevils will be the No. 3 seed in the 2025 GAC tournament, which begins Thursday at David Allen Ballpark in Enid, Okla.
The tournament will feature two pods of four teams, with each pod playing a standard double-elimination format until one team remains. This stage of the GAC tournament will continue until Saturday or Sunday, depending on how many games are necessary.
The final teams from each pod will then face each other in a best-of-three series May 9-11 hosted by the highest remaining seed to determine the champion.
UAM (30-19, 21-12 GAC) joins No. 2 seed Southern Arkansas, No. 6 seed Henderson State and No. 7 seed Northwestern Oklahoma State in bracket two.
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The Weevils will begin their title defense at 8 p.m. Thursday against Henderson State (28-20, 20-13). UAM lost three of four games against the Reddies this season, including a midweek home game and two of three GAC games in Arkadelphia. Meanwhile, SAU will face Northwestern.
The losers will meet in an elimination game at 1 p.m. Friday, while the winners play at 8 p.m. in the winner’s bracket.
UAM and SAU each finished the regular season with a team ERA of 5.18, tied for second in the GAC. The Weevils’ .299 team batting average ranked sixth.
Two of the top six hitters in the GAC are Weevils: senior catcher Chaz Poppy (.391) and senior infielder Justin Santoyo (.376). Poppy’s 53 RBI are third most in the GAC, with Santoyo’s 52 tying him for fourth. Poppy, last year’s tournament MVP, has the league’s best on base percentage, .495. Senior outfielder Kirk Woolf, meanwhile, leads the GAC in walks with 40 and triples with six.
UAM also enters the tournament with two of the league’s top six starting pitchers by ERA: Maxim Mrakovcic (8-2, 3.97 ERA) and Connor Irvine (6-5, 4.28 ERA).
Last season, UAM defeated Arkansas Tech in the finals to win its third GAC title. The Boll Weevils went on to win the NCAA Division II Central Regional before falling to Central Missouri in the Central Super Regional.