ROME, Ga. -- With a 10-1 win over Brewton Parker on Saturday the Berry baseball team clinched its first-ever Southern States Athletic Conference regular season title. The Vikings are now the No. 1-seed for the SSAC Conference Tournament hosted at the Golden Park Complex in Columbus, Ga. on April 28-May 2.
The Vikings finished the year 38-12 and had a league-best conference mark of 22-5. The team did not drop a single conference series all season and had three-game series sweeps of Shorter, Faulkner and Brewton Parker.

Berry is ranked No. 7 in the NAIA National ranking and finished a full game ahead of Southern Polytechnic. The Hornets finished second in the SSAC with a record of 43-7 and a 21-6 conference record and ranked No. 4 nationally. SPSU will be the No. 2-seed in the upcoming SSAC Tournament and will face the No. 7-seed at 7 p.m. on Wednesday.

Brewton Parker (26-26, 8-19) also advances to the double-elimination tournament as the No. 8-seed and will likely face Berry in a rematch at 4 p.m. on Wednesday on the opening day of the SSAC Tournament.

This is the first regular season championship for Berry, which won the SSAC Tournament in the 2005 season. That year Berry went to the Region XIII Tournament but failed to advance to the NAIA Tournament.

This year, the Vikings are guaranteed of making it into the field for NAIA Nationals. As conference champions, the Vikings earned the right to represent the conference's bid to be one of the nine hosts of the opening round of this year's NAIA National Tournament. Berry's William R. Bowdoin Field, will host the opening round on May 12-15.

This season 46 teams will qualify for postseason play in the NAIA Tournament. Berry is one of nine host sites that will have a five-team double-elimination tournament to determine the nine teams that will join hosts Lewis and Clark State in the NAIA World Series on May 22-29.