DOBSON — After a long and hard-fought season, the 2010 Surry Central baseball team can claim something very few Eagle players of the past can — they are conference champions.

After riding in second place behind West Stokes for a good chunk of the season, the Golden Eagles finally clinched the Northwest 1A/2A regular season title with a 6-0 win over North Stokes on Friday to finish 11-3 in conference play and 16-7 overall.

The title marks the first outright regular season crown for Central since 1987 and with strong teams like West Stokes, East Surry and Bishop McGuinness among others, the Northwest 1A/2A has been one of the more competitive conferences in the region.

With that parity, Central coach Matt Scott thinks his team has been helped by its strong play in the field and a pair of senior starting pitchers who have been on target all season.

“The biggest thing is that our defense has been tremendous this year,” Scott said. “I don’t know exactly the number of games but I would say that in half of our games we’ve had one error or no errors. The second thing is that when we send Austin McLamb or Luke Harris to the mound we get pretty tough to beat, no matter what else happens.”

According to Scott and his staff no team in the Northwest 1A/2A has scored more than two runs off of McLamb or Harris all season and perhaps more impressive is McLamb’s strike-to-walk ratio. So far this season the senior hurler has struck out 89 batters while walking just four.

That’s a number any baseball coach could be proud of.

“Austin throws so many strikes,” Scott said. “He pitches to contact, so the defense knows that he is going to be around the plate and the other team is going to put balls in play. They expect balls to be hit. What’s astonishing is that if he pitched to have more strikeouts he could have more, but instead he’s done what’s best for our team and he’s tried to keep his pitch counts down so he can throw more often.”

Scott, who is in his fourth season at the helm in Dobson, said he thinks this season’s team and coaching staff has continued to gel from a solid season a year ago. The amount of shared experience both on the field and in the dugout is finally beginning to show its worth.

“In high school ball it’s not a marathon like in big league baseball — it’s a sprint,” he said. “We sort of have gotten a better feel for what everybody is doing and what is going on around us. Part of what we’ve done is that I have had to get better at feeling out the personnel that we have. With the help of the coaching staff and just playing more games, we’ve got guys that are comfortable playing a couple of positions and a better feeling of where they fit in the lineup.”

The Golden Eagles will host this season’s conference tournament, with first round games scheduled to kick off tonight around the area.

Semifinal games will be Thursday in Dobson beginning at 4 p.m. with the championship game scheduled for Saturday at 7 p.m.

Central will host Mount Airy tonight, a team which is at the bottom of the conference standings but has given the Eagles trouble this season.

Scott said he and his coaching staff have tried to impart to his team that things are just beginning to pick up.

“We’ve got to play well tomorrow,” he said. “We can’t start thinking about other things. We’ve got to think about Mount Airy rolling in here, because we’ve been in a fight with them in both games this season. Our guys know they are going to be in for a fight. People don’t want us to win a conference championship and a tournament championship and do it at our place and that’s fine, I don’t blame them. But people want to be spoilers and we’ve got a big target on our back now because we are the one seed and certainly we aren’t taking anything for granted. We’ve told them all year to play hard, have fun and try to get better every day and we aren’t changing that philosophy.”

Contact Thomas Smith at tsmith@mtairynews.com or 719-1920.