The Brownstown Central and Trinity Lutheran softball teams combined for 38 hits and 26 runs Saturday, and when the final out was made each Jackson County team left the Cougars’ field with a win and a loss.
Trinity came up with five runs in the third inning in the opening game and held on for a 7-6 victory, while Brownstown scored nine runs in the top of the fifth for a 12-1 win in five innings in the nightcap.
Brownstown coach Monte Ault said he was pleased the way his team hit the ball in the second game after not playing as well as he expected in the opener.
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“I’m not taking anything away from Trinity, but we came over here and we didn’t execute the way we should have on some plays,” he said. “We made some base-running errors, we didn’t hustle on some plays that should have been made, and we had the bases loaded a couple times and didn’t score (stranding 11 runners) in the first game.
“We came back in the second game, and they had the same pitcher and that was about eight times we had seen her. We should have made contact, and when you make contact and get people on first and second with no out or one out it makes it rough, and it kind of takes the air out of the other team.”
Cougars Coach Bob Tabeling was happy to see his team beat a Class 3A ball club in the opener.
“It was a big win. I thought we played really well,” he said. “The top half of the lineup got several two-out hits, we scored a bunch of runs with two outs and that’s good for us form that standpoint.”
The Cougars had 11 hits in the opener, as Genesis Munoz and Bailey Reynolds both had a single and two doubles and Savannah Harweger had triple and single and scored two runs. Jaryn Holtsclaw and Harweger also scored two runs each.
For Brownstown, Zoe Fountain had two doubles. Alli Reynolds, Rehgen Stuckwisch and Kyra Huffman also had two hits each, and Huffman had two RBIs.
The Braves sent 13 runners to the plate in the fifth inning of the second game and had seven hits, two hits batsmen and two Trinity errors to score nine times.
Stuckwisch, Carlin, Reynolds and Emily Singleton each had two hits, and Fountain, Carlin and Erin Singleton all scored two runs.
Erin Singleton allowed the Cougars four hits in the second game. One of them was a home run by Munoz over the fence in left field in the bottom of the first inning.
“I thought Erin pitched a very good game,” Ault said after she allowed four hits with five strike outs and no walks.
Kyra Huffman had two RBIs in each game and scored three runs, Stuckwisch had four hits and three runs, Reynolds had four hits and three RBIs for the day, Fountain and Erin Singleton both scored three runs, and Carlin and Emily Singleton both had three hits for the Braves.
Munoz had three hits in the opener and the home run in the second game to lead the Cougars, while Reynolds had three hits in the first game, and Harweger had three hits for the day.
“We still need to keep working on the bottom of the part of the lineup and get some runs any way we can,” Tabeling said. “They’ve been contributing all year long. Today, the top half did a lot of work and it was a really good (first) game, and we had some good defensive plays. Karissa Newcomb made a great play (in left field) with a running catch.
“We didn’t make a lot (one) errors in the first game. We can hit with a lot of teams. In the second game we made some of those errors at the wrong time. It was a 3-1 game until that bad inning. That’s kind of been our season. We’ve had a couple games where we had a really bad inning where we gave up a lot of runs, and that’s what happened there, and you can’t do that against a good team like Brownstown with all the hitters they have in their lineup.”
The Braves (11-10) will host Charlestown today for senior night, with Claire Poulton being honored.
Trinity (7-8) will host Milan today.