Softball: Bats hot, gloves not as Seneca bests WFC in Tri-County showdown

RURAL STREATOR – Common softball wisdom will tell you that on cold days such as Tuesday at Woodland School, with the temperature in the low-40s and wind chill at 32 degrees, the advantage goes to the pitchers, and batters have their work cut out for them.

As it turned out, however, the Woodland/Flanagan-Cornell and Seneca batters did just fine.

It was the defenses that couldn’t shake off the cold.

The two Tri-County Conference favorites combined for 24 hits, but more impactful was their seven combined errors – five committed by WFC – in Seneca’s 12-5 victory to open the two-game series set to conclude Friday in Seneca.

“We’d been inside [because of bad weather] for almost a week,” WFC coach Jordan Farris said. “We wanted to get out and play, though these are far from ideal conditions. You can’t control that, but you can control how you respond to it, and we just didn’t respond very well in some cases.

“We gave [Seneca] a little bit too much, and a team like that, they’re fundamental, they’re sound, you can’t give them anything.”

Both pitchers, Seneca’s Taya Roe (7 IP, 2 ER, 11 H, 1 BB, 4 K) and WFC’s Shae Simons (7 IP, 6 ER, 13 H, 1 BB, 9 K), threw well in light of the conditions, but didn’t fool a lot of hitters or get a lot of help from their defenses. Of Seneca’s 12 runs, half were unearned. Only the first two of WFC’s five runs were earned, and even those were aided by a bad-hop single.

“The key to the whole thing is Taya Roe,” Seneca coach Brian Holman said. “She went out there and fought hard. I thought about taking her out in the fourth [inning], the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, but she went out there every inning, and when she’s out there throwing strikes in a game like this, that’s incredible, because that loosens us up to score some runs.

“Anything hit hard was just impossible to field today. Too cold for a softball game, but fortunately for us we got a couple barrels on balls.”

The game was tied at 2 after two. That’s when an inning-opening error by the Warriors defense cracked the door, and the Fighting Irish lineup – bats in hand – beat it down.

No. 2 hitter Maddy Klicker and No. 3 batter Sam Vandevelde had RBIs on back-to-back triples to put the Irish ahead 4-2. After a Zoe Hougas RBI single drove home Vandevelde, No. 5 hitter Madi Mino stepped in and delivered Seneca’s third RBI triple of the inning to make it 6-2.

“Mr. Holman has been working with me a lot on getting my hands and my hips in synch, and it’s been paying off this year so far,” Mino said. “It was a different mindset [hitting in the cold], but we did all right.”

Seneca went on to add three more runs in the third, on a Libbie Davis squeeze bunt and an Alyssa Zellers two-run double off the glove of diving left fielder Emma Highland, to go ahead 9-2. The Irish (2-0, 1-0) held off a WFC rally that began with back-to-back Seneca fielding errors and culminated in Cheyenne Burns’ two-run double and Chloee Johnston’s RBI single to cut the visitors’ advantage to 9-5.

WFC (2-2 overall, 0-1 TCC) drew no closer, however, despite a two-hit, three-RBI day from Burns, three singles and the aforementioned RBI courtesy of Johnston and two hits from Ella Sibert.

Leading the Seneca offense, Klicker (1B, 3B) and Vandevelde (2B, 3B) each provided two hits and an RBI. Mino had three hits (1B, 2B, 3B) and two RBIs. Zoe Hougas and Davis both added a single and drove in a run, and Zellers finished with a double and two RBIs from the leadoff spot.