Gallery by Tina Laney
Coal City – The last time Shady Spring and Independence met in the regular season, the game lasted 15 innings, resulting in a 1-0 Shady win last April.
This year the results were much different in a doubleheader matchup.
The host Patriots swept the Tigers in a twin bill Thursday in Coal City by scores of 7-1 and 8-0.
While last year’s contest took 15 innings to complete, it took Indy just 12 innings across two games this year to dispatch the Tigers with the mercy rule coming into effect in the fifth inning of the second game.
The sweep proved significant for the Patriots in that they swept their three sectional foes this week and will likely host the sectional tournament in two weeks.
“They call it homefield advantage for a reason,” Indy head coach Ken Adkins said. “We didn’t want to botch that in any way. We beat Nicholas County last night and earlier in the season and we beat Liberty twice already. We missed this game earlier in the season and wanted to make it up. I told the kids way back in March when we started that the goal was to sweep the section and make it easier on yourself. We play well at home. Now we get to host the section and if we win that this is our year to host two of the three games in the region. That’s a big deal to us and a big goal for our seniors.”
Shady fell behind early in both games on the evening and never truly threatened.
Indy’s Delaney Buckland spelled doom from the jump, drawing a one-out walk before a pair of strikeouts threatened to strand the free runner. Kendall Martin answered the call with a two-out RBI double to plate the first run. It signaled a complete flip after Shady was on the path to escaping damage.
Instead the miscues piled up.
A walk to Kassidy Bradbury put another runner on with Martin stealing third. A pair of wild pitches allowed Martin and Bradbury to both score, pushing the Indy advantage to 3-0 after an inning.
“Where they’re young we’re struggling hitting spots,” Shady head coach Nikki Mays said. “Both pitchers sometimes are struggling hitting their spots and if they don’t hit one then they don’t feel confident in throwing it again so then we get down to just a couple of pitches we can throw and it makes it hard to move the ball and change it up on them so they get used to it.”
Indy added its fourth run when Bradbury’s groundout scored Emma Lilly but the Tigers found some life in the fourth inning when Kendra Pizzino lined a leadoff double, scoring on an Avary Bragg groundout.
Independence promptly squashed the rally attempt in the bottom half of the frame, scoring three runs on RBI hits by Alli Hypes and Emma Lilly. Shady collected a pair of hits over the final three innings but they never materialized into runs.
The second contest played out much like the first with Buckland drawing a leadoff walk and her courtesy runner eventually scoring on a wild pitch. Bradbury added an RBI hit for a 2-0 lead but most of Indy’s damage was done in the bottom of the fourth when it sent eight batters to the plate, scoring four runs with RBI hits courtesy of Allie Warden and Alli Hypes, expanding its lead to 7-0.
A pair of two-out hits in the bottom of the fifth plated Savannah Stanley, enacting the mercy rule and handing Indy the sweep. It was an appropriate ending for the Patriots who ran the bases well all evening with Stanley scoring from first on a long single. In all they scored three of their 15 runs on wild pitches, moving around the bases to generate scoring opportunities.
“That was our goal today,” Adkins said. “They have a really good catcher and I really like her but they’re really young. When you’re really young you tell your kids to hit the cutoff. Young kids turn their back to the plate when they take the throw on the cut so we felt like if we got a single we could get an extra base. We might get caught every now and then but we were going to stretch that. We were able to do that today. The other thing we were able to do was be a little more aggressive getting runners into scoring position which we had not been able to do here lately.
“We wanted to really be able to focus on getting runners to second and third because we seem like we get hits when we need them, we just end up having to score from second instead of third. We did a really good job today of putting the ball into play. Like Woodrow really gets up for us, our kids really get up for Shady. They were determined because of how last year ended. We played in some wars and came out on the wrong side of some of those wars. Our seniors said they wanted to reestablish who we are and I felt like we did that today.”
Indy ace Delaney Buckland picked up the win in both contests, going the distance in each.
“We toyed with taking her out in the second game,” Adkins said. “This is her last time playing Shady in the regular season and she really wanted to win this games at home. I felt like if we could keep her under 100 pitches she could pitch in both and she stayed at around 80. We were able to shorten the second game too so that helped us.”
Email: tylerjackson@lootpress.com and follow on Twitter @tjack94
