True North baseball makes program history, earns first trip to state final four
Saturday’s breakthrough moment was five seasons in the making for Miami True North Classical Academy’s baseball team.
After making the playoffs but falling short of punching its ticket to the state final four in recent years, True North put together a dominant performance to sweep Hollywood Chaminade-Madonna, 2-0, in a best-of-three regional final series to secure its first-ever trip to the state semifinals in the program’s five seasons of existence.
True North (21-7), the No. 1 seed in Region 4-2A, finished off Chaminade Madonna (19-13) with a 12-3 win in the regional final round on Saturday at Glades Middle School.
“It’s emotional. It really is,” said True North coach Adrian Nieto, who has been in the position since the program’s first season in 2022. “To think where we started, we didn’t have a field. ... I remember one of our parents came for the first time. He goes, ‘You guys literally get it out of the mud.’ And he wasn’t lying, man.
“It has taken a village. Special parents, special kids. It will go under our name, but there’s more than myself and the players that were involved in this to make this happen. It’s literally been five years in the making.”
After senior pitcher William Foss threw five shutout innings to lead the Titans to a 12-0 win over the Lions on Friday, senior pitchers Carlos Victorero (two runs allowed in four innings), Alex Diaz (one run allowed in 1 2/3 innings) and Luis Gonzalez (zero runs allowed in 1 1/2 innings) teamed up to help True North clinch the series sweep on Saturday.
“We’re very blessed to have those guys out there, and it’s something that we’ve been working on throughout the whole season, honestly,” Nieto said of True North’s pitching excellence in its two wins over Chaminade-Madonna. “Just strikes, trust your defense.”
Next up for True North is a trip to Fort Myers to play Jacksonville Trinity Christian in the Class 2A state semifinal round on Monday, May 18 at either 10 a.m. or 1 p.m. at Hammond Stadium.
“Obviously, you got to enjoy this one,” Nieto said immediately after Saturday’s victory, not looking ahead yet at True North’s state semifinal game. “I think we’ve been full throttle all year long, Monday through Saturday, basically. Getting our workouts in every day. We’re busy. So they’ve only been getting one day of the week off on Sunday. So I think I’ll give them a couple of days to rejuvenate and get locked back in.”
True North never trailed on Saturday, opening the game by scoring the first four runs of the contest to take a 4-0 lead in the second inning. With True North entering the seventh inning with a 7-3 lead, the Titans put the game away with a five-run frame sparked by a grand slam off the bat of senior Ernie Velasco.
Also for True North on Saturday, Kash Ojeda recorded four hits, Victorero finished with three RBIs, Evan Alexander produced two RBIs, and Matias Fischer had two doubles and one RBI.
Saturday’s contest included a 30-minute delay at the end of the fifth inning because one umpire was affected by the hot weather and couldn’t finish the game. Two Chaminade-Madonna players were ejected from the game prior to the start of the sixth inning after tensions flared between the two teams.
“Hats off to Chaminade, great team over there,” Nieto said. “They got great players over there, but our boys were locked in and it showed. We’ve been waiting for this moment for five years.”
This story was originally published May 9, 2026 at 8:47 PM.
