LUMBERTON — The West Robeson majors team just couldn’t get anything going at the plate in Thursday’s Dixie Youth World Series game against Louisiana.

Then again, it’s hard to compete with perfection.

Cameron Guitterrez threw a perfect game, leading Girard, Louisiana to a 3-0 victory Thursday to win the Dixie Youth World Series majors championship.

“Their pitcher threw an excellent ballgame,” West Robeson coach Eric Freeman said. “He stayed all in the strike zone, mixed up his pitches, kept our guys off balance. Our defense played well. One swing of the bat scored two runs and a misplay of a ball in the first inning scored another run. So it was a really close game, it could’ve went either way very quickly.”

Guitterrez struck out 14 of the 18 batters he faced, allowing just one ball to be hit out of the infield.

“Early on I think the kids felt a little pressure hitting, besides the pitcher being really good,” Louisiana coach Derek DeLatte said. “And then Cam being able to come out and throw strikes — it was literally like playing a PlayStation video game, me calling pitches with him, because he was just hitting every spot, he was zoned in.”

Louisiana took a 1-0 lead in the first inning, then added two more runs in the third with an Austin Geudry home run. Dakota Locklear pitched well over his five innings for West Robeson, and Joseden Oxendine pitched the sixth.

“Our pitcher Dakota did great on the mound, our defense did great,” Freeman said. “That was one of those games that we expected that, we expected it to be a duel, we just didn’t know which way the bottle was going to tip and for this game it tipped in their direction.”

DeLatte brought an age 12-and-under team to the Dixie Youth World Series for the fourth time and Thursday’s win earned him his first championship; it is the first won by a team from Jefferson Parish, Louisiana in over 60 years.

Louisiana beat West Robeson 7-4 on Sunday; that game, along with Thursday’s championship, were the only two games Louisiana played in the World Series decided by less than six runs.

“We didn’t lose one game in All-Stars this year,” DeLatte said. “We rolled through district and state, and that was definitely the closest game, that’s the least amount of runs we’ve ever scored. Their pitching staff has done a great job.”

Like West Robeson’s Freeman, DeLatte coached his son on the Louisiana majors team.

“My older son won the Little League World Series a few years ago,” DeLatte said. “My younger son, Jace, his brother would always rib him that he’s a world champion. Now he won’t be able to rib him anymore.”

West Robeson earned a second-place finish in the Dixie Youth World Series after last year’s team, composed of mostly the same core, finished third in Laurel, Mississippi. This group has been together “off and on” since they were 7 years old, Freeman said, and the decision was made three years ago that the West Robeson All-Stars would play as one team, instead of a blue and white team as they had previously been organized.

“We had a great team, had a great run this year, played a lot of great teams, did a lot of fun baseball, went to a lot of places, got to see a lot of things and meet a lot of people,” Freeman said. “Our ultimate goal was to get further than we did last year; after that it was to win the championship. We peeled away at it, we met one of our goals on the journey.”

Memorable moments in the tournament for West Robeson included the game-tying and walk-off home runs by Seth Brooks and Zayin Hunt in the eighth inning against Lumberton, Eli Freeman’s complete-game shutout on the mound, and many others.

“It’s been one for the books,” Freeman said. “The first game we came out and went head to head with Louisiana, and that game was decided in the last inning, and that set the pace for the whole tournament I think. It was a very exciting game against Lumberton, a battle of the borders kind of thing, so we made a lot of memories there that will stick with these guys for years to come.”