The Salisbury legion team had a rare night off from playing a game on Monday, but head coach Scott Heppenheimer was still at work. He went to the Coplay and West Allentown game for a bit of scouting. He wasn’t the only one.

“I went to watch the Coplay and West Allentown game today, and there were five of my players sitting down the left field line watching their game,” Heppenheimer said. “That was kind of cool. They’re excited. We have work to do yet, but we are in a pretty good spot right now.”

The commitment and dedication of this legion group is evident, and it is showing on the field. There have been few hiccups this summer. Salisbury swept a doubleheader with Northern Valley on Saturday to improve to 12-1 on the season and hold down the top spot in the Lehigh Valley Legion standings.

There’s still a week of play left, with five games this week. But if Salisbury continues its winning ways, it will be looking at a trip to regionals. The team with the best regular season record automatically earns a berth, as does the winner of the legion tournament.

“We control our own destiny,” Heppenheimer said. “We win out and we’re definitely in. If we win, I’m thinking three out of five, we’ll be no worse than a tie. But we’ll see. Five games in five days is rough.”

That stretch includes Tuesday’s game against West Allentown in which results were not available at time of press. Then, the Falcons must take on North Parkland on Thursday and South Parkland on Saturday, a difficult task for any team.

And then Salisbury closes with a doubleheader against Coplay on Sunday, one of the few teams that can still derail the Falcons off their track to an automatic regional berth. Coplay is 9-2-1 and only a couple games behind Salisbury in the win column.

“We’ve had a lot of tight games where in previous years we’ve come up on the short end of the stick,” Heppenheimer said. “But I think these guys have been playing together for so long…and adding three quality players from Dieruff and a starting catcher from Central, it doesn’t hurt either.”

If the Falcons take care of business, they are in. They’ve already reversed a trend of subpar legion baseball in recent years. And with many of these athletes playing Connie Mack last year, Heppenheimer admits he is a bit surprised with the record at this point.

“I was hoping to just be .500 and get in the playoffs, just because pitching-wise I didn’t think we had enough,” Heppenheimer said. “We lost Taylor Linn for the whole season. He was basically our No. 2 all varsity year.”

Linn will be back on the mount in early July most likely. But in his absence, pitcher Andrew Sukanick has stepped up tremendously with a perfect 6-0 record and a sub-1.00 ERA. He’s also gotten plenty of help from pitchers Lucas Irwin, Colin Wagner, Cole Warmkessell and Will Rodriguez.

A prime example of the Falcons’ pitching was in that double-header on Saturday. Heppenheimer used a trio of Falcons to gut out Game 1 against Northern Valley, which included a save from Sukanick. And then Sukanick pitched a complete game gem in Game 2, a 6-2 victory over the Chargers.

“My mindset for that was let’s hope we can get out of there with a split,” Heppenheimer said. “They have one of the best pitchers in the league in Cordova. We got to Cordova a little bit and squeaked out Game 1.”

The record may be a bit surprising to Heppenheimer, but not the way this group has been playing. They’ll look to continue the solid play on Thursday when they travel to Parkland Middle School. Game time is at 6 p.m.