The Dominican University baseball team took a brief break from Northern Athletics Collegiate Conference (NACC) play on Thursday, falling to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Fightin' Engineers 5-2 at Schaumburg Boomers Stadium.
 
The loss drops the Stars to 12-11 overall with a return to league play on the schedule for this weekend.  Dominican will travel to Edgewood College for a 12:00 p.m. twin bill on Saturday before returning home to Boomers Stadium for a doubleheader with the Marian University Sabres on Sunday.
 
"We faced a pretty good Rose-Hulman team," said Steve Hardman, the Stars' head baseball coach. "They have been to regionals and play in a tough conference, so we knew they would be a good team."
 
"When you face a non-conference team in a mid-week game," continued Hardman, "pitching is going to be a problem and it is often offense that wins.  However, today we pitched well enough to win. We competed on the mound and that was pretty much the only place we competed.  We were not aggressive in the count at the plate and allowed a lot of 2-0, 3-0 counts to turn into strikeouts.  We kicked the ball around at crucial times in the field and gave them some runs."
 
"The hard part about the mid-week non-conference games is that you spend so much energy on the weekends in the conference games that the mid-week becomes a let-down. For us to be a good team, we have to turn our non-conference games into conference games and carry that energy over."
 
Brandon Diedrich took the loss on the mound for the Stars despite surrendering just three earned runs over five-plus innings on seven hits.  Dominican's bullpen then tossed four shutout innings, surrendering just one hit.  Austin Michals tossed three scoreless frames, surrendering one hit while striking out one before Noah Loeffler tossed a 1-2-3 ninth.  Together, Diedrich, Michals and Loeffler did not issue one walk all game.
 
RHIT opened the scoring in the fourth when Logan Cody roped an RBI doubled to left.  Cody scored later in the inning on one of four Dominican errors on the day.  Cody helped plate another run for the Fightin' Engineers in the fifth with a sac fly, scoring Harris Camp.  Two more runs for Rose-Hulman in the sixth staked RHIT to a 5-0 lead after 5.5 innings. 
 
The Stars cut into the lead in the bottom of the sixth.  Ryan Simak worked a leadoff walk followed by a single to center by Johnny Condron.  After Frankie Sessa lined out to right, both Condron and Simak moved up 90 feet.  Simak then scored when Mike Piotrowski bounced out to second base and Condron then scored on one of two RHIT errors in the game.
 
Dominican managed just four hits on the game, one apiece for Simak, Condron, Sessa and Camron Stafford.