Coal City – With one swing Shady Spring all-stater Jenna Joyce quieted the Independence crowd, putting a Paytin Brehm pitch over the fence in center field.
The Patriot faithful were raucous enough to make up for it over the following four innings.
Independence collected 13 hits Friday, turning them into 15 runs in a 15-2 bombardment of the Tigers in Coal City.
The win sends the Patriots to the Class AAA Region 3, Section 1 title game where they will face the winner of Saturday’s Shady Spring-PikeView elimination game on Monday back in Coal City.
While Joyce and the Tigers got the best of Brehm in the first inning, she finished ahead, allowing just one more hit the rest of the way.
“Just throw it and spin it,” Brehm said of her approach after the home run. “They adjust, they really do. They’re a good-hitting team, they are so you can’t let pitches hang. You have to spin it and can’t let it hang. It has to be a strike because they will take balls. You’ve just got to be smart about and that’s what I was trying to do. With Jenna, I’m not going to say what pitch, but there’s a certain pitch she does not like it and that’s what I usually throw.”
For Shady, which beat Independence 11-6 two weeks ago, it was a different story this time around as it struggled in all three phases.
“I couldn’t tell you what happened today,” Shady head coach Nikki Mays said. “They just didn’t come to play. When you’re not hitting and not making plays it wont go your way. They were on it.”
After Joyce’s blast in the first staked the Tigers to a 2-0 advantage, Independence got to work.
Emma Lilly, who finished 3-for-3, notched an RBI single to plate Kassidy Bradbury. But with the bases loaded, Shady Spring pitcher Raegan Lane secured a strikeout and pop out to limit the damage. She wasn’t as fortunate the remainder of the night with Indy’s bats carrying the momentum into the second inning.
After securing a popout, a walk to the No. 9 hitter set the plate for an RBI groundout from Bradbury to tie the game. The Tigers needed just one more out to escape the inning and replicate the prior frame. That out came, just seven batters later.
Hits from Ava Parks and Bella Lilly sandwiched a walk issued to Emma Lilly. Lane struck out the following batter with the score at 3-2 but the third strike was dropped and the throw to first wasn’t made.
The Patriots made it hurt from there.
Savannah Stanley was hit by a pitch with the bases loaded to drive in a run before Acasia Cook and Emma Simpson went back-to-back on two-run doubles to make it 8-2.
The onslaught continued into the next frame with Cook driving in another pair of runs and Simpson adding an RBI with a single.
“When they get behind in the count, every pitcher’s the same,” Independence ahead coach Ken Adkins said. “ It doesn’t matter if you’re a major-leaguer or you’re out here on the Independence softball field. When you get behind in the count, you can’t just keep throwing balls up and out, and then you’ve got to throw balls near the plate. If you throw balls near the plate, we can crush it. We just have to have plate discipline.
“And I don’t know what happens. And I guess it’s hard to pick up. Even the PikeView girl the other day, we struck out seven or eight times on the rise ball. We chased pitches up. And when we don’t – and finally, we wait, and when we don’t chase those pitches out of the zone, then we hit. I don’t know. It’s hard to – if we knew I could sell it to a lot of coaches I know, because I mean, everybody says the same thing, you know?”
For Independence it was another encouraging performance for an offense that hasn’t scored fewer than six runs since April 18.
It was also another encouraging outing from Brehm who allowed earned runs for the first time in her last four appearances, spanning across 21 innings. It’s marked a shift from the rest of her season where she had allowed 41 earned runs across 59 innings pitched in 17 games.
“My curveball, I’ve gotten more confident in it,” Brehm said. “I used to be really scared of hitting people. But lately I’ve just been like, ‘If you’re going to hit them, hit ’em hard!’ and that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Emma Lilly led Indy with three hits and three RBI while Simpson drove in a trip of runs and Cook a quadruplet.
Peyton Raban had two of Shady’s three hits in the loss
