HELENA — With its longest win streak of the season on the line, the Carroll College softball team faltered, giving up four runs in the fifth inning of its final game against Northwest Christian en route to a 4-3 loss.
“I thought we played well over the weekend. Unfortunately we had one bad inning that bit us,” head coach Aaron Jackson said. “Overall, we executed our plan and did what we needed to do.”
The Saints did play well across the span of five wins in six games. The team as a whole batted had a collective .318 batting average and posted 18 extra-base hits in that span. In the circle, the pitching staff gave up only 10 earned runs across the 42 innings, while striking out batters nearly twice as often as they walked them (33 Ks to 17 BBs).
While it’s easy to look back and pick out something that went wrong and point to it as the reason for failing, Saints junior Ali Williams took it a step further.
“Like [Jackson] said, it is kind of a little bit that one inning, but it’s also we just need to attack the ball early and get runs on the board in that first and second inning,” Williams said.
The Saints can’t change the past, but they can try control their future as they try to steer their way into the Cascade Conference tournament for the second straight time, third total, in the team’s fourth year of existence.
Their first stop on that journey is in Caldwell, Idaho to take on the College of Idaho starting April 12.
