Area teams sweep Mount Juliet

If Mount Juliet’s trip eastward to play three games in the Chattanooga area was an effort to face some tough competition early in the high school softball season, it worked. If the Lady Golden Bears’ mission was to avenge losses to Soddy-Daisy in the last two Class AAA state finals, it didn’t work.

With Mount Juliet returning almost all of its starters from a year ago and the Lady Trojans having to find successors for nearly all of theirs, Soddy-Daisy came out ahead again, pulling out 3-2 victory Wednesday at Soddy Lake Kids’ Park. It seemed that was the game the Lady Golden Bears were most geared toward.

“This was a good win,” Soddy-Daisy coach Clifford Kirk said. “We opened up with a very good team. We just jumped right into the fire. We’re going to be better than people think we are, if we come on. This is a good young bunch of kids, a lot of good athletes. They just have to get in the groove.”

After the game Mount Juliet traveled to Ooltewah where a ready-and-waiting bunch of Lady Owls scored all but one of their runs in the third inning on the way to a 9-1 victory, leaving the Lady Golden Bears 1-3.

“They beat us the last two times we played them,” Ooltewah coach Norma Nelson said. “They beat us 1-0 in the state tournament two years ago, and I think they beat us pretty good in the Soddy-Daisy tournament last year. They have a good team. I wanted to see how we would respond to a team with good tradition like them. I think we responded pretty well.”

Mount Juliet had defeated Smyrna 14-0 in its opener before coming to and playing 2007 Division II state champion GPS on Tuesday. Kamri Chester and Amy Campbell had RBI singles and Jackie Baird and C.C. Gordon hit run-scoring doubles in the first inning and Chester’s two-run homer in the fifth capped the Bruisers’ 6-0 victory.

The Lady Trojans scored first Wednesday when Brandi Lasley doubled and Kali Henderson tripled in succession in the second inning. They also had back-to-back hits in the middle of four in succession in Soddy-Daisy’s sixth.

Lasley’s was another double and Henderson and Whitney Johnson had run-scoring singles. Like Lasley and Henderson, Alex Everett was also 2-for-3 and started the winning rally with a one-out single.

The Lady Golden Bears equaled Soddy-Daisy’s seven hits, but only in one inning did they have multiple hits. Megan Matthews started the third inning by singling up the middle and she scored on a two-out double to left-center by leadoff-batter Caroline Mason on a pitch Soddy-Daisy coach Clifford Kirk said he wanted outside the strike zone. Mason came up in the seventh with the tying and go-ahead runners in scoring position and ended up receiving an intentional walk.

The strategy worked when winning pitcher Alesha Buckner got a called third strike for her second strikeout and the final out.

“Not counting a pitch that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, we made two glaring mental mistakes that cost us runs,” Kirk said. “We’ve got some young kids that did hit the ball hard. A couple of theirs were bunts, and one fell in the last inning that didn’t hardly get to the grass.”

Ooltewah took advantage of Mount Juliet mistakes — a hit batsman, an error and a wild pitch in its eight-run inning. Winning pitcher Holly Thomas had one of six singles in the inning and it drove in two runs.

“We started out slow,” Nelson said of the first time through the order against Shelby Morris, who pitched all three games for the Lady Golden Bears. “We swung at way too many pitches out of the zone. We have been working a lot on baserunning. We’re trying to be a little more aggressive than in the past.”

Thomas walked two and struck out 12 after a 16-strikeout effort against Walker Valley in her first outing. Mason’s sixth-inning home run was one of Mount Juliet’s two hits.

The Lady OWls’ final run came when Kaitlin Neil homered to center in the fourth. She, Bri Shoemake and Lexie Whittenburg finished with two hits each. Shoemake had a double.