Rams take 3rd place in Diehl softball tourney

An odd scenario and a player’s nice season debut helped the Maricopa High School softball team finish in third place as the host of the Krystin Diehl Tournament on Saturday.

After losing to Tombstone 7-1 in their morning contest, the Rams rallied to beat Coolidge 8-7 in the afternoon.

Kearsten Jensen saw her first action of the season in the Coolidge game and performed admirably, driving in two runs in the second on a hard-hit double down the third-base line and adding an RBI single in the third.

“We’ve always known she could hit,” said Maricopa coach Leslie Miritello. “We know that she had a strong bat at the plate, but we were a little hesitant putting her in defensively. … She’s been sitting for so long, so she really stepped up to the plate and did her part.”

The Rams jumped out to a 6-1 lead after three innings, but Coolidge stormed back with two runs in the fourth and a four-run fifth.

Miritello said the coaching staff has been working hard to make sure the players stay upbeat and not let a momentum shift like Coolidge’s six-run burst discourage the team.

“When they do stuff like that, they have a tendency to get down and it’s contagious. Whether attitudes are positive or negative, they end up being contagious,” she said. “We’ve had a lot of talks with them about communication in regards to be positive, (using) constructive criticism. So they’re working on that a lot, and they know they have to bring each other out of that.”

The talks appear to be working, as the Rams didn’t let the Bears’ surge fluster them and they rallied to score two runs in the bottom of the fifth to regain the lead.

Maricopa benefitted from a strange occurrence in the bottom of the third. With two outs and a runner on third base, the Rams’ Kirsten Molus took a strike for a 2-2 count. Both teams apparently thought it was strike 3, and they began to run off the field before the umpire announced the inning wasn’t over yet.

“So the girl on third who was starting to go back to the dugout was told to go step on home and Kirsten came back out,” Miritello said. “It’s just so strange.”

Tombstone, which the Rams defeated in pool play on Friday, ended as the tournament champions, with Florence in second place. Miritello was happy with the Rams’ third-place showing.

“The only team we didn’t beat (in the tournament) is Florence but I know we can play with them better than we did,” she said. “It’s nice to know that two of the three teams we were playing are in our region and that we can play with them.”

Maricopa’s next game is a rematch with Coolidge at 4 p.m. Tuesday at Coolidge.

Photo by David Argabright