On Monday, the MCHS Lady Serpents Softball team didn’t know exactly what needed to happen in order for them to qualify for the Northern Regional Tournament. The only thing that they knew was they had to take two wins from the undefeated Wells Lady Leopards. Coming into the final week of the conference, The Lady Serpents sat at 1-3 in conference play. Wells was undefeated at 3-0 with three games left to play, Eureka was 2-1 and Carlin was 1-3.
With those records, Carlin had to sweep Eureka and Wells also had to beat Eureka in a single game and the Serpents had to sweep Wells. If all that happened, Mineral County would qualify by way of winning the tie breaker. Carlin swept Eureka, Wells beat Eureka and now it was time for Mineal County to take care of business.
On Senior Day, MCHS honored four year letterman McKenna Cardenas and second year letterman Amyah Boyd. The team didn’t want today to be their last games.
In Game one of the doubleheader, Amyah Boyd was in the circle for The Lady Serpents. In one of her best pitching performances of the year, Boyd gave up five runs on six hits to the Leopards. It was the Lady Serpents that jumped out to an early four run lead in the second inning. Wells answered those four runs in the third, but the Lady Serpents scored on Amyah Boyd’s hustle scoring on a passed ball and McKenna Cardenas’ hard ground ball leading to an error by the shortstop scoring Perla Gutierrez for the sixth and final run.
The Lady Serpents won by a score of 6-5. Juliet Hernandez, Amyah Boyd and Perla Gutierrez all had hits in the game for the Lady Serpents.
In Game 2, The Lady Serpents seized victory in dramatic walk-off fashion, thanks to a walk-off error at the end of the game to topple Wells.
Heading into the bottom of the fifth, the Lady Serpents held an 8-3 lead needing only five runs to end the game by the mercy rule. The Lady Serpents pushed three runs across the plate before and had to go back on defense.
The score was 11-5 heading into the final inning.
Then things got interesting.
Wells scored 13 runs on hits, walks and errors to take an 18-11 lead heading to the final bottom half of the 7th. MCHS knew that in order to extend its season, they had to score seven runs to tie and eight runs to make the playoffs.
The first three batters of the inning walked to load the bases with nobody out for The Lady Serpents. Drayk Larramendy was called on to pinch hit for Sofia Castillo-Trujillo. In only her third at bat of the day, Drayk tripled down the right field line scoring three to make it 18-14 with nobody out.
After an RBI ground out, Wells would record the second out of the inning before Amyah Boyd came up and singled in Gutierrez, 18-16. Cardenas came up to the plate and reached on an error allowing Boyd to score to make it 18-17. Yulisa Lopez would pinch run for Cardenas and Jerzi Moody Isom reached on another error and the speedy Lopez would score from first while Moody-Isom would advance to third on the error to tie the game at 18-18.
That would bring up Lashay Stephens who hit a ground ball to the first baseman, somehow it got past her allowing Moody-Isom to score the decisive winning run sending the MCHS Lady Serpents to Regionals for the first time in three years.
Through research, this is the first time that MCHS has defeated Wells in Softball.
Mineral County will take on Smith Valley on Friday in Virginia City at 10 a.m.in the first round with the winner playing the winner of Wells and Coleville later in the day. The title game is Saturday at 12:15 p.m.
