Poland produces an eight-run inning and rolls over St. Dom’s.
By Kevin Mills
Staff Writer

AUBURN — When they had a prime opportunity to score and didn’t, it looked as though it would come back to haunt the Poland softball team.

Instead, the failed opportunity to pad the lead Thursday might have been the added motivation the Knights needed. In the next inning, Poland produced in a big way, breaking open a 1-0 lead with eight runs. It turned a tight game in a convincing 10-3 win over St. Dom’s.

“We’ve had a year that kind of been up and down,” said Poland coach Susan Robbins, whose team is now 3-5. “We’ve been consistently inconsistent. Somedays we’re right on it and somedays we’re not. We hope to sort out some of those issues and be a more consistent team. Today, was by far our best effort yet. Everything kind of came together.”

It was just the opposite for the Saints (4-3). St. Dom’s had five errors and managed just one hit through the first five innings.

“We haven’t allowed 10 runs in a game in about seven years,” said St. Dom’s coach Dan Samson, who juggled his lineup defensively with shortstop Sarah Caron out indefinitely with mononucleosis. “I think we only had about 10 runs scored on us all last year.”

The sixth was the decisive inning. Clinging to a 1-0 lead, the Knights had put the first two runners on in the fifth only to come up empty. A runner didn’t tag up on a fly that was chased down in left field. Then Poland ran itself out of the inning when St. Dom’s catcher Kat Vincent threw out a runner trying to steal second with clean-up hitter Nicole Lovejoy at the plate.

“I came in and told the girls that that was my bad,” said Robbins. “I thought that was over the kids head and she got it in her glove. That was my bad. The next inning, we proved that we had gotten the players on, and now we needed to bring them around. They really came out on fire.”

Poland produced eight runs on six hits and two St. Dom’s errors. Lovejoy had two hits in the inning, including a three-run triple.

“We haven’t been hitting,” said Lovejoy, who allowed just six hits and struck out seven. “We needed this bad. We’ve been on a losing steak, and we needed something to pump us up.”

Poland made it 2-0 with a Mindy Thomas single. Katie Simpson scored on a wild pitch and Megan Ford later drove in a run with a single. Courtney Clark, who had three hits and two RBI, scored on an error, and Lovejoy followed with her three-run triple. Her pinch-runner Brianna Pratte came in on a second error for a 9-0 lead.

“That sixth inning killed us,” said Samson, who brought in pitcher Amanda Collette in the sixth to replace starter Emily Goss. “We just made mental mistake after mental mistake.”

Poland added a run on a Clark single in the seventh. St. Dom’s rallied in the bottom of the seventh with three runs on four hits. Goss, Kat Vincent and Audrey Pleau each drove in runs with a hit, but the offensive production was too little too late.

“We didn’t do the basics,” said Samson, whose team stranded 10 runners. “When you don’t do the basic in a small game it hurts you. We had three innings where we had the lead runner on, and we couldn’t move them over. Then we got runners at first and second and couldn’t move them over.”

Poland got its first run in the second on a Clark RBI single. From there, the Knights rode some solid defense and Lovejoy’s pitching until breaking the game open in the sixth. Sarah Lefebvre had a couple of nice plays in right, robbing Vincent of a sure extra base hit with a nice catch.

“We’ve been up against some pretty good pitchers this week,” said Lovejoy. “We’re all really tired, but we all wanted this really badly. We needed it because we’ve been in a slump.”