May 19, 2015 4 min read

CANONSBURG – For the Monessen High School softball team, last week’s 5-4 victory over North Catholic was an historic one, the program’s first postseason win in its first postseason appearance.

So when senior shortstop Cara Grogan ripped the first pitch of Tuesday’s WPIAL Class A quarterfinal playoff game against Chartiers-Houston over the right field fence, Greyhounds head coach Bo Teets thought, ‘Hey, why not us?’

The top-seeded Bucs, however, had other plans.

Chartiers-Houston, playing its first game in two weeks, answered with two runs each in the first and second innings, and a five-run fourth inning to end Monessen’s hopes of an upset, 9-1, at North Strabane Intermediate School.

The Bucs (18-2) advance to play Bishop Canevin (8-5), a 5-3 winner over Serra Catholic Thursday at a yet-to-be-determined site. Monessen, meanwhile, sees its historic season end at 11-4.

But for just a couple of minutes, the Greyhounds were where they wanted to be after Grogan’s homer.

“She’s a good hitter and a good player,” Chartiers-Houston head coach Tricia Alderson said. “It was a nice hit. We kept our composure and came back and hit well ourselves.”

Unlike the Greyhounds, the Bucs are a battle-tested group. And that showed throughout the game as they made the right play time and again. And though freshman pitcher Kaitlyn Dittrich was making her first playoff start, she didn’t show any jitters, limiting Monessen to five hits while striking out five and walking just one batter.

When Monessen did pose a serious threat in the fourth inning with Chartiers-Houston ahead 4-1, the Bucs made the defensive plays needed to help Dittrich out of the jam.

Ondrea Burroughs and Taylor Guzzie hit back-to-back one-out singles to put runners on first and third. But Carly Rock hit a ball right at Bucs’ third baseman Sabrina Stankus.

Burroughs broke for the plate and Stanuks threw home to catcher Casey Craig, who ran Burroughs down from behind for the second out. Dittrich then got a strikeout to end the inning.

“We made a good defensive play at third and got the girl going home,” said Alderson. “And Kaitlyn made some nice pitches to get us out of it.”

Things didn’t work out nearly as well for Monessen pitcher Dana Vatakis in the bottom of the inning.

Vatakas had recorded four consecutive outs via strikeouts entering the inning, but ran into trouble when No. 9 hitter Jalynn Myers singled and leadoff batter Megan Kraushaar followed with a double off the fence in left to put runners at second and third. Sabrina Stankus followed with an RBI single and Kayla Alderson was walked on four pitches to load the bases.

The hard-throwing Vatakis, who had six strikeouts, induced a weak ground ball back to herself, but Kraushaar knocked the ball free on an attempted tag to make it 6-1. Two more errors would follow and by the time the inning was completed, it was 9-1.

“That’s what a good team does,” said Teets. “If we capitalize there, it puts a little more pressure on them. They worked themselves out (of the jam) and then put some runs up. They never looked back after that.”

Kraushaar, Stankus, Alderson and Myers all had two hits each for the Bucs, who had 12 hits, but stranded 10 batters.

“Defensively, I thought we played a pretty good game,” Alderson said. “I thought we left too many runners on base, but we haven’t played a real game in two weeks. We’ve played some scrimmages, so we’ve seen live pitching. Hopefully, we’ll sharpen up by Thursday.”

Teets and Monessen, meanwhile, will have to regroup and hope the taste of postseason play the team got this year will fuel the team in 2016.

“That’s as solid as a single-A teams as you’re going to see. They’re going to be a tough out for anybody,” Teets said of the Bucs. “I can’t be more proud of our team. This is a tough one. It stings right now. But they’re going to be able to look back and really be proud of what they did as a team.”