ROCHESTER — When Leah Hartley made the decision to join the Rochester High School softball team last spring, it came with one caveat.
“I was begging her and begging her since I’ve been the coach,” head coach Joni Guerrero recalled with a chuckle. “She’s like ‘OK, I’ll play if I don't have to pitch’ and I was like ‘OK, fine, you don’t have to pitch.”
That didn’t end up happening. Not last year for seven innings and definitely not this season. Yet Guerrero knows one thing about her senior that she’s learned over the course of time, from afar and in the dugout.
Hartley will do anything for her teammates. And she’ll do it happily.
“Nothing fazes her,” Guerrero said. “She’s going to smile her way through it. She is team first.”
The right-hander finished with five runs batted in at the plate and tossed a complete game in the circle to aid Rochester to a 14-4, five-inning victory over Onalaska on Tuesday night in a non-league contest at Rochester.
After getting no-hit by one of the best Class 2A teams in the state in Mark Morris, the Warriors (9-2) have responded with four straight wins and the last three have been via run-rule. They have eclipsed double digit runs in eight of their nine victories.
For an offense that brought back seven starters, it hasn’t been a shock.
“We all trust each other, we know what we have and what we can do,” Hartley said. “We have a lot of strong hitters.”
And for a bit, there was the possibility the bats would have needed to carry Rochester.
Before the season kicked off, Guerrero admitted the likelihood of last spring’s Evergreen Conference MVP Layna Demers wasn’t going to throw an inning this year. She was battling some ailments coming off 150-plus innings in the circle.
So Hartley and Arissa LeBaron were going to be the top-two pitchers.
“They were ready to go,” Guerrero said.
It had been since Hartley was a youth she played competitive softball, let alone pitch. Still, she was willing and able to step into the circle.
To this point, her earned run average sits at 3.77 in five starts and opponents are hitting .259 against her. LeBaron has similar numbers in a couple of starts. Those two won’t need to shoulder the load, since Demers is working her way back.
Still, depth is paramount.
“Joni trusts me and Arissa to throw too,” Hartley said.
Hartley danced around a couple of errors and five hits to only allow two earned runs. Onalaska (3-8) tied the game at two apiece in the top of the third and after the first three Rochester batters reached in the bottom half, Hartley had the chance to redeem herself.
She roped a bases-clearing double to right-center field to put the Warriors ahead for good.
“Just pretty much stay confident,” Hartley said. “That felt really good.”
They added nine runs in the fourth inning on RBI hits by Hartley, Piper Quarnstrom, McKenna Vassar and Demers. The heart of Rochester’s order – Vassar, Demers and LeBaron – combined for seven hits, five RBIs and eight runs scored.
The Loggers were led by two hits and an RBI by catcher Randi Haight. They scored two runs on an error in the fifth and had a runner in scoring position to extend the game another half-inning, but came up short.
“It is a work in progress, we’re trying to get over the hump,” Onalaska head coach Rich Teitzel said. “We got to clean up our game. I got a bunch of fighters, scrappers, ballers. They just have to learn to put it together.”
A return to C2BL action for Onalaska will happen on Thursday against Winlock, then it faces two of the league’s unbeatens in Rainier and Adna.
“They got to play as a team, get rid of the errors,” Teitzel said. “If they clean it up, we can make a run.”
Rochester will face Elma on Thursday before facing Pe Ell/Willapa Valley in its third-to-last non-league game. The Warriors are only a few games away from clinching an unbeaten mark in the Evergreen League their first year in 1A.
“Just little minor things that are going to come,” Guerrero said.
