Columbus East was forced to try and play catch-up for the entire softball game against Shelbyville on Friday after a six-run inning by the Golden Bears broke the game open.
Shelbyville hit three home runs including two three-run blasts on it’s way to beating East 10-0 in five innings.
The Golden Bears scored a run in the first before a home run by Kaylee Kingston, RBI-singles from Katie Lux and TeAnn Bringle and a three-run homer from Izzy Lewis gave them a 7-0 lead after the first two innings.
The Olympians held Shelbyville scoreless in the third inning, but allowed three more runs in the fourth when Bringle clubbed the Golden Bears’ second three-run homer. Shelbyville finished with 11 hits.
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“They’re a very solid team,” East coach Rusty Brummett said of Shelbyville. “Coach (Mark Hensley) does a nice job with them. They hit the ball very well. Yeah, we had a couple of errors, but they just hit the ball very, very well.”
The Olympians (6-6) put the ball in play on multiple at-bats, but the Golden Bears defense continued to make plays to keep East from getting on base. The Olympians did manage five hits that included two singles from Brooke Valles who went 2 for 2. Jenna Robbins got on base with a double, and Madyson Foster and Kaitlin Nickerson had the other two hits for East.
Erika Henry threw a five-hitter for Shelbyville.
“Their pitcher was probably not an overpowering pitcher,” Brummett said. “It was somebody that I feel like we should of had some better at-bats. She did a nice job moving the ball around. She did a nice job keeping us off balance, but it felt like from the beginning, we just didn’t compete the way we normally do.”
Valles pitched the first three innings for the Olympians before Robbins took over in the middle of the fourth to finish the game.
This was East third game in three days, but Brummett said his team can’t use that as an excuse for not playing to its potential. He is confident that his players will fight back and compete hard in their next games moving forward. Shelbyville is the defending sectional champion and will be the team to beat in this year’s East Central Sectional.
“Me and my staff own this, and the girls didn’t execute, I didn’t execute,” Brummett said. “The program just wasn’t where it needed to be today, but we can fix that. It’s not to the point where everything is so broken we can’t fix it.”
