H-town edges Stone for SMAC

Cougars’ 6th-inning rally not enough

Friday, May 9, 2008

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Stone 1 0 0 0 0 4 0 – 5 7 2 H-town 1 2 2 0 1 1 x – 7 11 2 WP Stueckler, LP Therres Extra-base hits: 2B – Nyers (TS), Gilroy (TS), Cook (H), Sita (H)

Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL

Huntingtown’s Alyssa Cook gets to home plate safely around Thomas Stone catcher Ally Sloan.

By MICHAEL REID

Staff writer

Huntingtown is making it easy on the engraver who etches the names on the SMAC championship plaques. The host Hurricanes won their third straight title Tuesday after jumping ahead and then surviving a late-game rally to defeat Thomas Stone, 7-5.

The SMAC schedule maker deserves a substantial pay raise after somehow managing to pit the two teams, who each had just one conference loss, against each other in a winner-take-all scenario.

Huntingtown (17-1, 15-1 SMAC) scored at least a run in each of the first four innings and survived a furious charge from the Cougars in the sixth inning to win the team’s third straight crown and second straight outright.

‘‘As a coach I could say I’m not incredibly happy with the win,” Johnson said, referring to Stone’s four-run inning that put the Cougars back in the game. ‘‘But that would be taking a lot away from Thomas Stone and they were 16-1 [overall] for a reason coming in here. Even though those kids were down 6-1 with two innings to go, they never quit.”

Huntingtown enjoyed a five-run lead with just six defensive outs remaining.

‘‘Without a doubt I knew it wasn’t over, [but] I think maybe some of the kids relaxed a bit,” Johnson said. ‘‘Not a lot, but just enough that a good team could take advantage of it.”

And Stone (15-2, 14-2) did exactly that as Kayla Voorhees led off the inning with a single and raced to second when the ball bounced through the legs of the left fielder.

With one out, Brittany Therres stroked a run-scoring single and, three batters later, Brittany Gilroy bombed a two-run double off the right field fence. Pinch hitter Tiffany Mills then squared to bunt and, on the third pitch, poked a two-out, two-stroke slap bunt past first base to score Gilroy.

‘‘That was a bad defensive arrangement on my part,” Johnson said. ‘‘All we needed was the out, so I should have pulled [second baseman] Ashley [Dorr] back. I should have made a change and it cost us.”

‘‘I relied on the same pitch,” Huntingtown pitcher Haley Stueckler said, referring to Stone’s five-hit inning. ‘‘At the beginning of the season that’s what I did, and I fell back into that habit that inning.”

Catcher Alyssa Cook added, ‘‘I think we got a little nervous, but we still knew we were still in the lead. We just needed to work as a team and hold them.”

The Hurricanes answered right back on Stueckler’s RBI single in the bottom of the inning and pulled ahead 7-5.

‘‘That was really tough because we had two outs,” Voorhees said of the run. ‘‘All we needed to do was get the last [out]. That’s just the way things fall.”

Christina Hutchinson was hit by a pitch in the top of the seventh, which brought Voorhees to the plate. The Stone infielder had two singles and a walk in her previous three at-bats, but went down swinging.

‘‘She’s a lot like [Kristin] Schalk from Northern, because they’re both definitely good hitters,” Stueckler said of Voorhees. ‘‘I knew not to throw one pitch, because that’s what she got all her hits on, so I just tried to mix it up a lot more. It was definitely a big [strikeout].”

‘‘I disappointed myself,” Voorhees said of the at-bat, ‘‘because I know I could have done way better than I did.”

Stueckler then retired the next two batters to seal the title-clinching victory.

‘‘I’m very proud of them, they never gave up,” Stone coach Dave Reilly said. ‘‘A lot of teams when they’re down by that much in the sixth inning may not have come back, but these girls did. Right to the last out they thought they were going to win this game, and I thought we had a real shot to win it.”

‘‘It’s a tough one because we were obviously expecting to do better than we did,” Voorhees said, ‘‘but I’m just glad we fought back the way we did. We didn’t let the game slip away like a lot of other [teams] would have.”

Stueckler, struck out seven and retired eight straight and 15 of 17 after allowing a leadoff single to open the game. She also collected three singles, drove in two runs and scored twice.