And when the moment of truth came, she quieted the Lady Warriors’ bats in her program’s biggest game in a decade.
Cox scattered four hits and allowed just one earned run Tuesday as Liberty punched its ticket to the Class AA state tournament with a 9-2 win over East in New Richmond.
The Raiders will open state tournament play (double elimination) on Wednesday, May 26 against Logan at approximately noon.
After yielding 41 hits to the Lady Warriors in their previous three matchups, Cox utilized her past experience to attack them and quiet their bats.
“It’s a lot of pre-gaming,” Cox said. “Before the game you’ve got to look back at the video before and see where you pitched them and how hard they hit it and where they hit it and everything like that. That’s really what I looked at today. They like to hit right field a lot so I just thought to jam them up and pull them to left field, see what that would do. My inside pitch was the approach tonight because I knew they would hit my outside corner.”
Even if East’s bats had been able to replicate the offensive trends that held coming into the game, its defense didn’t answer the call. Nine East errors aided a Liberty offense that just missed scoring in double digits for the fourth time in five postseason games.
“We didn’t adjust,” East head coach Doc Warner said. “They kept pitching us inside so I told them to back up a little bit and nothing changes. Liberty hit the ball well. They put it in play.”
Aiming to put the pressure on an East defense that struggled to handle it throughout the year, Liberty relied on solid hitting to segue into it. Singles from Maddie Toler and Alyssa Scarbro opened the scoring in the top of third with Allie Bowles driving in the latter on a sac fly for a 2-0 lead. Stella Brown followed with a two-out double but East chipped into the deficit in the bottom of the frame when Mak Hatfield grounded into a fielder’s choice, scoring Kaydee Shrewsbury.
Three consecutive errors in the top of the fourth helped Liberty push the lead to 4-1 with the wheels slowly falling off in the following innings.
“The first thing we said is, ‘We bat first today, we’ve got to get up,’ which we didn’t,” Liberty head coach Mary Green said. “We held them and we were keeping it even and that’s what we said. We have to get up and get some cushion. Once you get them rolling, they all start firing.”
Katie Mullens pushed the lead to 5-1 in the fifth with a leadoff home run before Cox later singled home Bowles with two outs.
East finally fought back in the bottom of the sixth when Alivia Monroe hit her fifth home run of the season, her third against Cox, but two walks and two errors in the top of the seventh more than made up for that chip.
Facing 2-3-4 in the lineup in the bottom of the seventh, Cox retired the side in order to kick off the celebration.
“She was on today, especially with the rain,” Green said. “Having to get a new ball every few pitches, it’s tough on a pitcher. She’s tough.”
Mullens led Liberty with two hits while seven different Lady Raiders registered an RBI.
Monroe was the only Lady Warriors to register both a hit and an RBI.
