DECORAH, Iowa — Talk about your classic David vs. Goliath.
The Saint Mary's University of Minnesota fastpitch softball team entered Tuesday's regular-season finale against Luther sitting at 17-19 overall—and coming off a pair of losses to UW-Eau Claire Monday in which the Cardinals plated just one run over 14 innings.
Aka, David.
Luther, meanwhile, took the field owning the nation's No. 4 ranking, the Iowa Conference's regular-season title—not to mention an impressive 30-2 record that included a season-opening, program-record 24-game winning streak.
Aka, Goliath.
And thanks to some seventh-inning heroics by
Alex Raske (Chicago, Ill.) and
Stanzy Snyder (Johnston, Iowa)—not to mention a clutch first collegiate pitching start by
Abbey Killian (Fountain City, Wis.), David played the mighty Goliath to a draw.
Snyder delivered a two-out single to score Raske from second, breaking a 4-4 tie in the top of the seventh inning—and Killian completed her first collegiate complete game with a scoreless seventh—in leading the Cardinals to a 5-4 victory in the second game of the teams' nonconference doubleheader. Luther, using a six-run second and a three-run fifth, kicked off the day with a 9-5 victory.
The Cardinals jumped out to a 2-0, third-inning lead in Game 2, thanks to a two-run single by
Ashley Betzold (Farmington, Minn.), but Luther answered with two runs in the fourth and two more in the fifth to take a 4-2 lead.
Unfazed, Saint Mary's knotted the game at 4-4 with two runs in the sixth—the first on a
Kathi Opsahl (Elk River, Minn.) RBI single and the second on
Mariah Harper's (Schaumburg, Ill.) team-leading fourth triple of the season, scoring pinch-runner
Katie Ehlenfeldt (Beaver Dam, Wis.) with the game-tying run.
The Cardinals' first two batters in the seventh were retired on a strikeout and a groundout, but Raske kept the Cardinals' hopes alive with a two-out single, moved to second on a wild pitch, and scored on Snyder's game-winning single.
Raske, Snyder, and Opsahl all had two hits to account for six of the Cardinals' nine Game 2 hits, while Betzold drove in two of the team's five runs.
Killian (2-0) went the distance in the pitcher's circle, limiting the high-powered Norse to four runs on 11 hits, while walking one and striking out five.
In the opener, the Cardinals grabbed a quick 1-0 lead on a Betzold solo home run in the first, but Luther erupted for six runs on seven hits in the second inning to take a 6-1 lead.
Saint Mary's chipped away at the Norse lead, scoring single runs in the third, fourth, and fifth innings—getting a
Kali Aldrich (Rochester, Minn.) home run in the third, a Harper sacrifice fly in the fourth, and a Snyder single in the fifth—to make it 6-4, but a three-run Norse fifth put the game out of reach.
Betzold finished 2-for-3 with two runs scored and an RBI, while Saint Mary's other five hits in the opener came from five different players.
With the split, the Cardinals closed out the season with an 18-20 overall record.
