By Angela Watts
Managing Content Editor, DigitalSports.com
** Look below the story to find four separate video players filled with dozens of video highlights and interviews from all four Northern Region softball quarterfinal games.
Two things became quite apparent by the end of the Northern Region softball quarterfinal quadruple-header held at Falls Church High on a wonderfully hot — and long — Memorial Day.
The first is that Robinson, the defending regional champions, will not go down without a fight.
The second is that, this year, there is no tournament favorite. Each of Monday’s four winners — Herndon, Langley, Westfield and Robinson — showed flashes of brilliance in their quarterfinal victories.
And each, too, showed vulnerabilities.
Robinson, in Monday’s nightcap, watched a five-run lead evaporate into a two-run deficit in the top half of the sixth inning against Stone Bridge.
But the Rams didn’t stay down for long. Robinson rallied for three runs of its own in the bottom half of the inning to secure an 8-7 victory.
Rams’ senior pitcher Erin Henning, one of only a handful of returning starters from last year’s title-winning team, recovered nicely from a rough sixth inning in which the Bulldogs sent 13 batters to the plate and totaled seven runs on eight hits after only registering one hit in the previous five innings.
Henning blasted an RBI double to left field in the bottom half of the inning to score the game-tying run, and three batters later senior catcher Alex Powers singled in the game-winner.
Henning then went back to the pitching circle and promptly retired the last three Bulldog batters in order.
“We have to prove to everyone that we’re not an easy team to beat,” Henning said. “Earlier in the season they had kind of written us off because we started out rough, but we’ve really come back really hard and I think we’re playing to what we really are capable of.”
Robinson’s victory was the third one-run contest of the day, as Herndon defeated South County, 1-0, in the day’s opener and Langley defeated Centreville, 7-6 in eight innings, in the second game. The third contest was almost as tight — and certainly every bit as exciting — with Westfield besting McLean, 3-1.
Herndon senior pitcher Katie Rynex, who recently returned to play from a broken right ankle, led the Hornets both offensively and defensively. Rynex totaled 12 strikeouts against the Stallions, and also earned the game’s lone RBI on a double down the left-field line in the first inning that scored senior Marra Hvozdovic, who reached on a leadoff single back to the South County pitcher.
“They both actually feel great,” Rynex said of the RBI and her 12 strikeouts. “But pitching is my love, so doing that … I loved it.”
Langley got two runs in the bottom half of the seventh inning to knot the score with Centreville at 6 and force an extra inning. There, it was senior centerfielder Lindsay Brown, who reached on a leadoff walk, who scored the game-winner on a Wildcat throwing error. Brown also opened the game’s scoring with a solo home run over the centerfield fence in the second inning.
“With 10 seniors on the team we were like, this could be one of the last games playing together, so we put all our effort in,” Brown said of going to extra innings. “And luckily we came out with the win. … Getting it in any way, that’s great.”
Westfield, which used three different pitchers to keep McLean off-balance at the plate, plated a single run in each of the first, third and fourth innings to take a 3-1 lead into the bottom of the seventh. But the Highlanders kept fighting, and sat in a bases-loaded, two-out situation with senior catcher Alaura Maglio at the plate.
But when Westfield freshman pitcher Jackie Martinez got low and the ball escaped senior catcher Elizabeth Jones, it looked as if McLean would cut the lead to one run. Instead, Jones flew to the backstop to retrieve the passed ball and fired it to Martinez, who made the tag at home for the game’s final out.
“I was thinking that I should have stopped the ball, that I shouldn’t have let it go,” Jones said. “And then when I was chasing after it, I thought that [the runner] definitely had the base at home. But then I threw it and saw that she wasn’t there … Once [Jackie] got it, I was really excited.”
On Wednesday night at South County in the semifinal round, Herndon and Langley will meet at 5 p.m. followed by Westfield and Robinson at 7 p.m.. The two winners will not only advance to Friday’s regional title game at 6:30 p.m. at Yorktown, but will also earn automatic berths into the upcoming Virginia AAA state tournament.
Email: awatts@digitalsports.com
GAME 1
Herndon 100 000 0 — 1
South County 000 000 0 — 0
GAME 2
Centreville 000 130 20 — 6
Langley 011 200 21 — 7
GAME 3
Westfield 101 100 0 — 3
McLean 001 000 0 — 1
GAME 4
Stone Bridge 000 007 0 — 7
Robinson 311 003 X — 8
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