Northeast Nodaway showed that its win over Platte Valley last year was no accident as lightning struck twice last Tuesday, September 6th as they won 8-6. It all started early when Lindsey Jackson, perhaps the sneakiest player on the team, pulled off a perfect suicide squeeze that brought Jill Boswell home. Northeast jumped out to leads of 2-0 of 4-2 behind solid hitting and pitching.
All of a sudden, all hell threatened to break loose as Northeast started making errors and Platte Valley rallied to take the lead at 6-4. Something similar happened in Ravenwood last year when the Bluejays jumped out to a 4-1 lead, only to have two errors snowball into a 16-4 rout in the final two innings. But all of a sudden, instead of folding, Northeast pulled themselves together and put together four more runs to take an 8-6 lead.
In the last inning, Platte Valley threatened again and saw their best hitter, Maggie Collins, come to the plate. Collins could only field and not hit for the first several games of the season, but she was cleared to hit Tuesday. She already had two hits for Platte Valley and came up in the seventh. She hit a tricky grounder to Lindsey Jackson at third, but this time, Jackson saved the Bluejays with her glove as she threw a laser beam to first to retire Collins, and Northeast preserved the win.
Jackson's successful squeeze was the first successful suicide squeeze pulled off in recent memory, at least as far as we know, since 2006. The nerves for the game were high, as Platte Valley had ten errors, including some down the stretch that fueled Northeast's final push. Northeast had six, but they also had some outstanding defensive plays, including Jackson's play on Collins as well as cutting down two Platte Valley runners on the basepaths.
The Bluejays earlier had a 14 inning scoreless slump, but their revival has been fueled in part by the hitting of Makenzie Pride, who nearly completed a cycle with a single, double, and triple. Coming off surgeries of one knee two years ago and the other knee last year, she has turned into a force, crushing everything in practice and now hitting everything in the game as well. She added two hits against Albany and has had a total of five hits in the last two games. Ruby Wilmes was also instrumental in Northeast's resurrection, hitting a triple against Platte Valley after getting an extra base against Albany. Hadley DeFreece continued to pitch well for the Bluejays.
Asked what adjustments she made after the Bluejays fell behind, coach Payton Adwell said she simply asked them if they wanted it and walked away. "We're trying to adopt a next pitch mentality," she said. "We fed off their errors to get back into the game." And the next pitch mentality was evident in the next day's practice. If you didn't know any better, you would never have guessed that Northeast had just brought down one of the top teams in the area. They did a ton of fielding drills that day, along with their usual hitting routine.
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