Hillers nearly flawless in wipeout of West Allegheny
The Trinity High School softball team is sure making it hard for head coach Shawn Gray to be critical in the postgame meetings.
Take Friday afternoon’s game against powerful West Allegheny in a critical Class 5A Section 4 affair.
Maybe he could have scolded the offense for not producing enough runs, but the Hillers hung a 10-spot on the Indians and needed only five innings to do so. It was the ninth straight game Trinity had reached double-digit runs in a game.
Or maybe he could have tore into the defense but Trinity did not commit an error or allow a run in those five innings, fielded every batted ball cleanly and made the play where they should have been made on Trinity’s turf.
Possibly, the pitching? Forgetaboutit. Taylor Dunn was magnificent in five shutout innings. She struck out eight, walked two and allowed only one hit. She was lights-out good when it counted most, wiggling out of 2-on-none-out jam in the first inning, then becoming almost unhittable after that.
Even when things could have gone wrong, they turned out right. Pinch-runner Hanna Stedman was on third base when cleanup hitter Hanna Suhoski, who had three RBI, smacked a line drive that caught Stedman on the foot, sending her down to the artificial turf in pain. But Stedman had taken her lead in foul territory. Instead of her being out if she had been in fair territory, it was called a foul ball. Stedman scored on a single by Dunn.
Yes, there was little if anything to criticize after Trinity’s 10-0 slapdown of West Allegheny which might be why the team lined up and danced and sang a song blaring from a speaker instead of listening to a long postgame talk by Gray.
“Phenomenal pitching by Taylor Dunn. She had a ton of strikeouts for us,” Gray said. “We’ve stuck to our game plan going in there. Our girls were pumped, keeping in the zone and looking for their pitch.”
That’s why Trinity holds first place in the section with a 5-0 record and West Allegheny is second at 4-1. The two teams meet again Friday in Imperial.
What excited Gray a lot was the production from the bottom third, which produced three of the runs and five hits.
“Our four-run inning (in the third) started with the bottom of our lineup,” Gray said. “I’m confident that either at the top or bottom of our lineup, we’re going to draft runs.”
Dunn, hitting eighth, had two hits and four RBI in the middle of scoring 10 runs over the third and fourth innings.
“I tried a different changeup and I really liked it,” said Dunn. “I was proud of that. It’s nice to have a cushion in case something happens.
Meanwhile, West Allegheny head coach Mindi McFate held her postgame talk. And boy did she have a lot to talk about.
“Anytime you have runners on and don’t score, it’s a momentum-killer,” said McFate, referring West Allegheny’s first inning. “It was only the first inning. There was a lot of game left. It was a missed opportunity but you have to believe other opportunities are going to come along.”