The Newberry College Wolves baseball team completed a season opening three-game weekend road sweep of Barton College with a 3-1 and 13-9 victories Saturday.

It is the best start of the season since 2022 when the Wolves began the year 8-0 and quite a turnaround from a year ago when the Newberry struggled to a 1-5 start.

Freshman Chansen Cole was brilliant in his collegiate debut, allowing just one run on four hits with three strikeouts and no walks over five innings in the game one seven inning victory.

Sophomore Brayden Gilson allowed just one hit over the final two innings to earn the save.

The Wolves scored all their runs in the fifth inning after two outs to break up a scoreless affair with catcher Luke White singling to right to drive in Cooper Gentry and Chandler Mims following with a single to center to drive in White and Jesse Free who singled earlier in the inning.

Barton followed up by scoring a run with no outs in the sixth inning before Gilson came in and extinguished the rally, allowed a leadoff single in the seventh before retiring the next three batters to end the game.

In the nightcap, the Wolves got another solid start, this time from Hunter French, a door slamming performance in the ninth inning from Gilson and an explosive 18-hit attack from the Newberry offense.

French improved to 7-3 in his Newberry career by allowing three earned runs on six hits over 5.2 innings.

Mims and Kade Faircloth each had three runs batted in while Keillor Osbon and Wilson Wages both drove in a pair of runs.

Free had two hits and scored three runs while Bryson Nuckols had two hits and scored a pair of runs.

The Wolves ran out to a 5-0 lead after three and a half innings thanks to a run scoring single and triple by Wages and a two-run single by Mims before the Bulldogs closed the gap to 6-3 heading into the seventh.

Newberry scored five runs in the seventh sparked by Faircloth's three-run home run and two more in the ninth to stretch the lead back out to 13-5, but Barton scored four runs in the ninth to cut the lead to 13-9 before Gilson retired the final two batters with two runners on to end the game.

Wages, a redshirt freshman from Clinton, is off to a hot start in his collegiate debut, picking up six hits in 10 at bats with five runs batted in and a stolen base in the three-game series.

Nuckols picked up seven hits in 12 at bats with six runs scored in the series while Free had five hits in 10 at bats with four runs scored.

Newberry's starting pitchers combined to allow just seven earned runs in 16.1 innings for a 3.86 earned run average over the three-game series.

The Wolves open the home season Thursday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. at Smith Road Complex against Emmanuel.