New Trier Teaches Kit Girls Clutch Lesson

Arch-rival New Trier showed Evanston’s girls softball team just how it’s done with 2 outs Monday.

The Trevians scored all 7 of their runs with 2-out hits and completed a season sweep of the Wildkits with a 7-5 triumph in a Central Suburban League South division game at ETHS.

The New Trier victory interrupted Evanston’s modest two-game winning streak and dropped the Kits to 8-17-1 overall and a final mark of 2-8 in league action. The Wildkits have two regular season games remaining --- at home Thursday against Whitney Young and on the road Saturday at Resurrection --- before opening postseason play.

Evanston, the No. 11 seed in the Class 4A Maine South Sectional complex, will host a regional tournament. The Kits are matched against No. 5 seed Lane Tech on Wednesday, May 22nd at 4:30 p.m. and the winner of that game will advance to the regional title game against either No. 4 Taft or No. 13 Jones Prep on Friday, May 24 at 4:30 p.m.

Oak Park-River Forest, Maine South, Whitney Young and Taft were voted the top four seeds in the sectional.

Maybe ETHS will finally break through with those clutch hits once the postseason starts. You couldn’t blame the Kits if they were out of sync right from the start for the Monday makeup game, with four junior starters scrambling to try to make it to the ETHS field in time after a delayed start to some college placement testing at the school forced them to show up late.

The arrival of catcher Delila Liston just 10 minutes before the scheduled start finally gave Evanston head coach Amy Gonzales the minimum 9 players required to start the game. Other players arrived later, but Gonzales had to lean on senior Lexi Lennon --- who hadn’t started in the circle since her sophomore season --- as the starting pitcher.

To her credit, Lennon threw strikes but yielded 4 runs in the 1st inning. Junior Isabelle Anthony, who has emerged as the ETHS ace in the second half of the season, yielded just 2 earned runs in 6 innings of relief work.

Liston blasted her fourth home run in the past week to lift the home team to a 5-5 tie in the bottom of the 4th inning. But that was the last Evanston hit of the game as New Trier junior reliever Trinity Andelin didn’t allow a hit over the last three frames.

“That’s something that was out of our control. Nothing we could do about it,” said Gonzales regarded the revamped lineup to start the game. “But we’re not getting timely hits with runners in scoring position. We’ve been playing better --- I’ve seen the improvement --- and the hitters are getting better. We just have to start stringing some hits together.”

Evanston answered New Trier’s 4-run splurge to start the game with 3 runs of its own in the bottom half of the inning. Frances Heldt slapped a one-out single to left, Liston drew a walk and Serafina Goodwill hammered an RBI double off the center field fence.

Goodwill came around to score on Sophie Berger-White’s single and an infield out, but Lennon tapped back to the mound with the tying run left at third base.

Evanston pulled even in the 4th when Rosie Witt walked and Liston homered to right center with two outs. Then Andelin took over in the New Trier circle for starter Addy Varca, and only allowed two baserunners.

She hit Berger-White with a pitch leading off the 5th, then struck out the side. She retired 7 straight Wildkits, hit Goodwill with a pitch in the 7th, then whiffed Berger-White and got Olivia Stanczak to rap into a game-ending forceout.

Berger-White went 2-for-3 with three stolen bases for the losers. Heldt also contributed a pair of hits.