With an 8-3 win on Sunday at Missouri-St. Louis, the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville baseball team has secured first place in the Great Lakes Valley Conference's South Division and will host the league tournament on May 10-13.
         SIUE, 32-20 overall and 18-6 in the GLVC, hold a four-game lead in the South Division over Missouri-St. Louis with three games to play at Kentucky Wesleyan next weekend. As the host, SIUE is the No. 1 seed in the six-team tournament.
         On Sunday, the Cougars scored on a sacrifice fly in the first inning from Dave Crouthers (Edwardsville). SIUE took a 3-1 lead in the third inning off RBI hits from Chad Opel (Edwardsville) and Crouthers. The same RBI combination of Opel and Crouthers singled home two more runs in the fourth inning to give SIUE a 5-2 lead.
         SIUE tallied one run in each of the seventh, eighth and ninth inning. It was capped off by Nick Seibert's (Worden) team-leading ninth home run of the season.
         Josh Clark (Olalla, Wash.) went eight strong innings for SIUE to improve his record to 4-1.
         Mark Bugger, a senior from Edwardsville, made another move on his trek to become the all-time NCAA Division II leader in hits. Bugger, who has already broken the career records in 2000 for runs batted in and runs scored, recorded three hits off UMSL in the rubber game of the series. Bugger now has 330 hits, passing Eric Mirza (1995-1998) of Tampa. The all-time leader is Mike Stevenson (1988-1991) of Lewis with 341 hits. -siue-
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