Bluefield – Bluefield softball coach Barry Reed wasn’t particularly pleased with his team’s situational hitting through three innings Monday.
Twice during that span the Beavers left the bases loaded and once more they left two on, though it didn’t seem to matter.
Staying disciplined at the plate, the young Beavers gave their two seniors Sandraya Dickey and Jordan Jones a proper senior night with a 10-2 victory over James Monroe in five innings at Bluefield High School.
The stage was set for a slugfest early with the two teams trading runs in the opening frame but the Beavers slowly inched runs across before exploding for four in the third to take a 6-2 lead.
“I thought that (leaving runners on) would come back to haunt us,” Reed said. “We just kept on and we ended up run-ruling them surprisingly but it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit if it was a dogfight in the sixth inning because us leaving all those runners on base. That was something normally you don’t get out of.”
The Mavericks were the ones making noise with their bats early when Chloe Shires opened the game with a triple and scored on a Shannon Phipps groundout.
Bluefield’s freshman hurler Maddie Lawson retired the following two batters to get out of the inning and helped her own cause in the bottom of the frame with a two-out double that scored Abby Richardson.
It wasn’t the only two-out turbulence the visitors from Monroe County experienced. After Phipps retired the first two Beavers in the second inning she issued a two-out walk, her third up to that point, and an error on a ball hit to shortstop off the bat of Cara Brown allowed the walked batter – Grace Richardson – to score and break the tie.
“This team, if you don’t make errors and you hit the ball you win,” James Monroe head coach Jack Phipps said. “We beat Shady (Spring), we beat Oak Hill, we beat Covington, Va. last week which is a very good team. Two errors is all we had during the game and we hit. We had two games canceled this past weekend and it hurt us so I feel like everybody was in front of the ball. But (Bluefield) played an error-free game and hit the ball when they needed to but you’re right, walks killed us.”
The Mavericks nearly countered in the top of the third as two batters drew walks but back-to-back strikeouts of the No. 3 and 4 hitters in James Monroe’s lineup allowed Lawson to escape the jam.
The Mavericks weren’t so fortunate in the bottom of the frame.
A pair of walks and a single loaded the bases with no outs, forcing Coach Phipps to pull his daughter Shannon from the circle. It helped a little, though not much.
A hit batsman drove in the first run of the inning before Grace Richardson stepped to the plate two batters later. With one out, she hit a single that scored two and Brown followed by reaching on another error. Lawson followed by drawing a bases loaded walk to push the fourth run of the inning across, making it a 6-1 game.
James Monroe attempted to counter with Emily Bailey hitting a one-out double in the fourth but Lawson was true again in diffusing the threat.
“The only thing I got upset with her about is she walked the ninth place hitter twice,” Reed said of Lawson. “She did, not once but twice. I think both times she did it to leadoff an inning. Other than that the ‘ole girl’s a freshman and she absolutely exploded this weekend as far as hitting. I think they only got her out once or twice the whole weekend and today she put the ball in play offensively and her pitching you can see is getting better. She’s only 14 years old and we’ve got a long ways to go with her.”
The No. 9 hitter, Shaylin Wickline, drew her second walk of the game in the top of the fifth and later scored on a Phipps RBI double but it made little difference as the hosts scored four in the bottom of the fifth to include the mercy rule. The final run crossed the plate when senior Jordan Jones hit an RBI single to score Sophie Hall who reached on an error earlier in the frame.
“Jordan Jones and Sandraya, I told everybody to make sure they came today because it would be a couple of years before our next senior day because we don’t have any juniors in our program,” Reed said. “Sandraya, I had her in ninth grade math and that’s how I met Sandraya. She was one of these people that would come and say ‘what do you think about coaching softball?’ and all of that. And I would look at her and say ‘Sandraya, if you wanted me to coach softball, first of all you don’t want me to coach softball. You may like me today but you wouldn’t like me on the softball field.’ We kind of joked round about that but Jordan and Sandraya, they’ve been with me and stuck with me since I’ve been here. They’re the only two that stuck with me so you have a little special place in your heart.”
Bluefield improves to 9-8 and will travel to PikeView on Thursday while James Monroe drops to 9-7 and will host River View on Tuesday.
Email: tylerjackson@lootpress.com and follow on Twitter @tjack94
JM: 100 01 – 2 4 5
B: 114 04 – 10 8 0
Pitching and catching – JM: Phipps (2 IP), Bryleigh Thomas (2.2 IP) and Shaylin Wickline and Shannon Phipps; B: Maddie Lawson and Grace Richardson. WP: Lawson, LP: Phipps.
Hitting – JM: Chloe Shire 1-3 (3B), Shannon Phipps 1-2 (2B, 2 RBI), Emily Bailey 1-2 (2B), Kaydence Weikle 1-2; B: Grace Richardson 2-3 (3B, 2 RBI), Cara Brown 1-4 (RBI), Abby Richardson 2-3, Maddie Lawson (2B, 2 RBI), Sophie Hall 1-3, Jordan Jones 1-3 (RBI), Thylor Mabry 0-2 (RBI).