PHILADELPHIA, Pa. – The Niagara Purple Eagles held a lead for most of the first six innings, but a big seventh inning gave the Temple Owls a 10-4 win on Friday morning.
 
Niagara (4-8) built a 3-0 lead through the first two innings. On offense, Joel Klock brought in the first run of the game with a sacrifice fly in the first inning before Kevin Paulsen and Anthony Firenzi extended the lead to 3-0 in the second with a hard-hit ball to second base and a single, respectively.
 
"We have a solid ball club when we play well, but like most teams, when we don't anything can happen," head coach Rob McCoy said.
 
Defensively, Jordan Schwartz kept Temple off the board until a double in the third cut the lead to 3-2. Four of the six innings he threw were shutout innings, but another double in the fifth tied the game at 3-3. Schwartz finished the afternoon with three runs on seven hits and struck out nine batters.
 
Three consecutive singles from Paulsen, Firenzi, and Taylor Hackett in the top of the seventh gave NU a 4-3 lead heading into the home-half of the frame where Temple would score seven runs, five of which were unearned, to take the six-run lead.
 
"I sound like a broken record player, but we need to pitch and play defense better," McCoy said. "Both let us down again today. We aren't making a lot of mistakes, but the ones we're making are big and in big situations."
 
Michael Bucci pitched a shutout eighth inning, but the Purple Eagles weren't able to climb any closer and fell by a final score of 10-4.
 
Firenzi led the team at the plate with a 3-for-5 outing and was one of the four Purple Eagles to collect an RBI. Ben Zaccagnino took the loss for NU.
 
The team is back on the field tomorrow at 10:45 a.m. when they go head-to-head against Saint Joseph's.