MG topped in district semis

By ROB HAMILTON

An excel­lent sea­son by the Mount Gilead soft­ball team ended Tues­day at Pick­er­ing­ton North as North­ridge topped the Indi­ans 6–1 in a dis­trict semi­fi­nal game.

The Vikings did most of their dam­age in the sec­ond inning, when they tal­lied four runs. Faith Hizer opened the inning with a triple off Indian pitcher Baylee Smith and was dri­ven in by the next batter.

A walk then put run­ners on first and sec­ond for North­ridge pitcher Kassi Davi­son, who smacked a dou­ble to give her team a 3–0 lead. The Vikings would add one more run on a two-out hit to go up by four.

The Indi­ans weren’t able to string together enough hits to make up that ground. In the first inning, they had two run­ners on base with only one out, but came away empty-handed.

“We had a cou­ple of chances,” said head coach Joe Ruhl of his team’s offense. “In the first inning, we had a cou­ple on and one out and didn’t get anything.”

They also put a run­ner on sec­ond with one out in the sec­ond inning, but were once again held scoreless.

In the third inning, Cay­lor Arnold opened with a dou­ble. With one out, Smith beat out an infield sin­gle to put run­ners on the cor­ners. Macayla McAvoy then smacked a dou­ble to bring in Arnold.

How­ever, with the score at 4–1 with run­ners on sec­ond and third and one out, the Indi­ans would not be able to keep it up offen­sively. While a walk loaded the bases with two out, North­ridge was able to escape the inning with no fur­ther dam­age done.

The Vikings would get back to a four-run lead in the top of the fourth, as a grounder by Kayla Davi­son drove in a run. They would then add another in the sixth as Kayla Davi­son smacked a run-scoring dou­ble. After that run scored, it seemed the Vikings had the momen­tum, as Mount Gilead strug­gled to get in scor­ing posi­tion the rest of the way.

After the Vikings added one more run in the top of the sixth, the Indi­ans got a run­ner on third with two outs in their half of the sixth. How­ever, the team would be unable to score in either that frame or the sev­enth as their year ended with a 22–4 record.

While he would have liked the sea­son to last a bit longer, Ruhl noted that his team had no rea­son to be ashamed.

“We’re not walk­ing out of here with our heads bowed,” he said. “We won 22 games and were Blue Divi­sion champs, so we’ll go out of here with our heads held high.”

The coach noted that he would miss his senior play­ers next year, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the acco­lades two in par­tic­u­lar have received dur­ing their careers.

“Baylee Smith is the all-time win­ningest pitcher in school history,” he said. “And Cay­lor Arnold is one of the best posi­tion play­ers I’ve ever seen.”

Posted by Rob Hamilton on May 23 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.