Minutes apart, Maggie Dunaway hit a two-run homer to put Southwest Mississippi Community College up two in the first inning of their softball game against Gulf Coast, and Ryan Griller drew a bases-loaded walk to score the winning run in the baseball opener for the Bears against Jones County.
This week’s weather had pushed the quartet of games back to Sunday. Both teams split their doubleheaders, but both also had shots to sweep.
Softball was the first to come from behind to win its opener. The Lady Bears had scored one run in the first and led 1-0 until the sixth inning. Gulf Coast hit a three-run homer to take the 3-1 lead.
Southwest didn’t waste any time getting it back. Angelia Polk, Maggie Jackson and Kaitlyn Perry got on and came around to score the three runs the Bears needed for the 4-3 victory.
“Our intensity was up the whole game for us,” Southwest head coach Patsy Sandifer said. “We were in it every inning. We had to battle back and got after it.
“We left seven to eight on base, so it wasn’t odd that we finally brought them in in the sixth.”
In the second game, Dunaway’s homer put the Bears up, but Gulf Coast found another three-run shot in the third and a solo homer in the sixth to get up 6-2.
Jackson and Kara Simmons hit back-to-back homers in the bottom of the seventh, but the big hits didn’t mean much as the Bears fell 6-4. “That’s only their second division loss,” Sandifer said of the Bears’ victory in Game 1. “It was a big win for us, but I still felt like we had the opportunity to win both, and that should lift us up.”
After the baseball team won its first game 5-4, Southwest head coach Lee Kuyrkendall felt the same way about the 7-6 loss in the nightcap.
“Normally, I would say we’d be very happy to win one game from a team the caliber of Jones County,” he said. “But the thing is we put ourselves in the position to win both games. A couple more plays and timely hits and we would have had an unbelievable sweep.”
Jones County had hit a three-run homer in the third and scored again in the top of the seventh for a 4-1 lead. Four singles and four walks led to Southwest scoring four runs to win it, but the game-winner didn’t carry much excitement with Griller taking the fourth ball to win it.
Eric Boyd, Rob Thames, Laramie Pittman and Steven Mercier all singled consecutively to start the inning, and from then on Jones County pitchers didn’t get back around the strike zone.
The comeback also served to even out starter Taylor Riggs’ record further. Riggs was 2-3 entering the game and, after holding Jones County to four hits and striking out two, he earned the win.
In the second game, the Bears stayed close. After tying the game at 3 and giving up four runs in the next inning, Southwest didn’t get all of those runs back.
Pittman hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the fifth to close the gap to 7-5, and Bubba Boggs drove in a run with a sacrifice fly to make it 7-6.
