ASHLAND – Fourteen Wheelersburg baserunners never advanced past Pirates coach Teresa Ruby in the third-base coaching box at Ashland on Saturday afternoon.
Ten were stranded and four erased by Male on the base paths.
That wasn’t enough to keep Wheelersburg from knocking off the Bulldogs of Louisville, Kentucky, 4-3, in a matchup of region runners-up in their respective states in 2024 in the Tri-State Softball Showcase.
And it gives the Pirates, whose aspirations are set well beyond victory on Saturday, something to work on as they continue pursuit of a redemptive trip to the state tournament in Akron, Ruby said.
“It's about timely hitting,” Ruby said. “You can look at the box score, looked like we had quite a few hits, but we didn’t get them when we needed them, and we pressed a little too much. So it’s about settling in and hitting better pitches than what we did today.
“But we walk away with a win,” she added with a chuckle. “We're not gonna be unhappy about that.”
Emma Smith’s RBI single with two outs in the fifth inning gave Wheelersburg (7-0) a two-run cushion it eventually needed when Male (10-3) pulled one back on Kaylee Brooks’ squeeze bunt to score Lily Jones in the bottom of the sixth.
That got the Bulldogs within a run with five outs remaining. But Pirates hurler Kaylynn Carter bore down to get those five outs consecutively to put it away.
Carter scattered six hits, struck out four hitters and walked one in a route-going performance.
“Kaylynn’s a pitcher who actually pitches,” Ruby said. “She's not gonna throw; she’s pitching. She’s gonna try to outsmart you, but she knows she’s got a solid defense behind her.”
That defense made a pair of sparkling plays to help Carter. Right fielder Mylee Jo Gleim threw out a Bulldog trying to stretch a single into a double in the third inning, and Smith made a running snare of a looping ball near first base, far from her position at second, to secure the first out after the sacrifice bunt.
Carter also supplied the RBI double in the third inning that put the Pirates ahead to stay. Before that, Laken Wright’s run-scoring single and Catie Boggs’ run on a Male error gave Wheelersburg a 2-0 lead in the top of the first.
The Bulldogs, coming off a 10-7 loss to Lawrence County right before meeting the Pirates, got those back in the bottom of the frame. Jones doubled home a run and Aubrey Miller singled in another to tie the game.
That was the sort of response Male coach Donald Murphy was hoping to see after losing the previous game, and after the Bulldogs’ layoff of eight days due to flooding in Louisville.
“I wasn’t surprised,” Murphy said of Male’s fight against the Pirates. “I told them I was proud of them. It would have been easy just to roll over and pout after that bad outing, but they’re a gritty group of kids.
“We had a good talk to them, just a calm, ‘Look, this is not indicative of how we are and how we play,’ and they responded. Even though we didn’t come out on the right side of the scoreboard, I was proud with the way they played.”
The game matched two teams seeking stronger competition than they’d seen in their schedules to date, and who traveled in search of it to the showcase Ashland co-hosted with Boyd County, Russell, East Carter and Bath County.
Wheelersburg hadn’t played a game decided by single digits before knocking off Lincoln County (West Virginia) 5-0 on Friday, and of Male’s 11 games before Saturday, the final margin in seven of them was eight runs or more.
Smith and Lauren Truitt each had two hits for the Pirates. Boggs scored twice.
Jones was 3 for 3 for Male. She doubled and scored two runs.
Eighth-grader Josslyn Woosley went the distance and took the decision for the Bulldogs. She issued three walks and had no strikeouts but ...
