Kayla Buckmaster takes a hard swing at a pitch during one of the Lady Wave's games in Spring Creek.
SPRING CREEK — The Lady Spartans are still looking for consistency out of their offense after losing a pair of games to Fallon in blowout fashion on Saturday.
Fallon overwhelmed Spring Creek in the first game of the doubleheader, 17-5, and won the late game, 16-0.
The weekend series puts the Lady Wave’s standing at 11-4 overall and 10-0 in league.
Even though Spring Creek could not play a full seven innings with the Lady Wave, the early game of the doubleheader went six innings.
Spring Creek had to rely on recent call ups from its junior varsity team with Ashley Bodin still battling a groin injury and could not keep Fallon off the board. Fallon coach Tammie Shemenski said the Wave had a slight advantage since they were playing less experienced players.
The Lady Wave scored four runs in the first inning and ended the game with a pair of five-run innings in the fifth and sixth.
For the first time in the series, however, the Lady Spartans showed some life on offense. Josie Corona led the way at the plate with a pair of RBI and scored a run.
Allie Thompson, Lexi Voegele and Alexis Sanchez also chipped in with an RBI each. The Lady Spartans had five hits in the game but could not keep up with Fallon who had 17 hits and eight extra base hits.
Fallon’s Caitlyn Welch was a leader for the Wave, scoring eight runs with four RBI over the three games.
Shemenski said her team also pitched strong all weekend. She recalled Faith Cornmesser and Hannah Hitchcock each had seven strike outs while Kayla Buckmaster had eight.
The coach said they also did very well at bat. She said she was happy with their performance at bat since the players have had issues in the past.
“We hit the ball well, whether it (the pitch) was slow or fast so we made good adjustments there,” she said.
Spring Creek head coach Chad Nelms said his team’s plate approach was looking better even though he did not get the results he wanted.
“We were better at the plate today. It’s not going to show that we had a ton of hits but we put the ball in play a lot,” he said. “We made some decent contact off of both the pitchers we faced that day.”
Even though Fallon piled up runs in the series, the Lady Spartans defense did not give Fallon a lot of help. Spring Creek had five errors in the early game but tightened up on defense and only had two in the series finale.
Nelms said he still needs his defense to be aware of where to go for outs when there are runners on base.
“We had a lot of girls playing out of possession at the end,” he said. “We kind of got lazy that morning where we lost track of runners on base and things like that. But, in the second game we were able to create some outs.”
The defense was better in the series finale but the offense did not build on its momentum and Spring Creek was shut out. Voegele and Paige Nelms were the only Lady Spartans to get a hit in the game and no one got into scoring position.
There was at least one positive for Spring Creek in the series-finale loss. Bodin got in the game to test out her injury in the circle. She gave up nine runs on 10 hits but figures to pitch more in the team’s next set of games at Fernley.
Kaily Webb finished the game and quieted things down a bit, only surrendering four runs in the next 1.2 innings.
Spring Creek had a rough series against Fallon but Nelms said he is more concerned about the day to day improvement of his players than the final score.
“The reality is, we’re just going to run up against teams that are better than us,” he said. “Sometimes that gets lost amongst everything else, the other team was just better. As long as the girls are showing progressions then I don’t take the scores into account much.”
On Friday, Fallon swept Spring Creek 11-0 in five innings. The Wave consistently scored each inning but the third; Spring Creek kept Fallon from running too far ahead, but could not stop the scoring streak or score its own runners.
Cornmesser pitched the game, keeping the Lady Spartans off the bases and allowing only one base hit.
The Wave’s next game will be Tuesday at 3 p.m., against Fernley. Shemenski said they’ve been working on hitting during practices and scoring runs over the Lady Vaqueros.
“If you’re not scoring runs, it doesn’t matter how good your defense is,” she said. “I want to make sure our offense is just as good as our defense.”
