The Toledo softball team that came north to Rec Park for the second time Tuesday looked a fair bit different than the one that had made the trip Monday, and the new-look Riverhawks exploded right out of the gate in their resumed 2B district quarterfinal against Ilwaco en route to an 11-2 win.
The Riverhawks led 1-0 but hadn’t gotten a hit through two and a half innings Monday when lightning flashed against the sky and sent all four teams at Rec Park back home for the night.
Tuesday, the teams came back and went through their normal warm-up routine, but when the Fishermen went back into the field and the Riverhawks grabbed their bats, Toledo came in with its run on the board.
“There’s a lot of mental stuff to it,” Toledo coach Jeff Davis said. “Coming in knowing ‘Hey, we’ve got a 1-0 lead and we’re coming up to bat,’ that’s where you want to be.”
Maybe that mental boost had something to do with the second first frame of the game. Peyton Holter — the Riverhawks’ No. 9 hitter — led the day off by getting hit by a pitch, and Mialeigh Jurica followed that with a single.
After an out, Toledo took advantage of back-to-back errors, then back-to-back singles by Kailea Larson and Zaya Norberg, then a single by Bethany Bowen that was compounded by yet another error to plate five runs.
“I don’t know, maybe they were a little bit looser today,” Davis said. “You put the bat on the ball, and sometimes things happen. It seemed like those first couple innings today, we were finding the holes. Little bloopers over here, bloopers over there, ground balls here, ground balls there.”
That gave Bowen an even greater cushion to work with, and Toledo’s ace took advantage. Bowen struck out 10 on the day and scattered five hits and two runs across seven innings, never letting Ilwaco get much in the way of momentum at the plate.
“Bethany’s throwing well, and the defense is getting better for us,” Davis said.
The Fishermen scored their first run in the top of the fourth, but Toledo responded with four in the bottom half of the inning, batting around for the second straight frame. When Ilwaco got a run back in the top of the sixth, Bowen matched it herself with a two-out RBI double.
Bowen finished 2 for 3 at the plate, driving in a pair of runs. Zaya Norberg scored two runs on a 2-for-4 day.
Toledo advances to the quarterfinals of the 2B District 4 tournament, and now can lose a game without seeing its season end. The Riverhawks with take on Pe Ell-Willapa Valley — the Pacific 2B League Champions — on Wednesday at Fort Borst in Centralia.
