Chatham Softball Tops Madison in the Rain

A seven run rally in the fourth inning, coupled with pitcher Amanda Fazio's eleven strikeouts, propelled the Chatham Cougars to a 10-2 victory over the Madison Dodgers on Wednesday.

While tennis, baseball and track contests for Chatham teams were rained out on Wednesday, the Chatham softball team knew how important it was to get this game played. Madison High School is in both the same conference and state section as Chatham and the game needed to be played to ensure a complete conference record.

For this reason, the game was moved to Lum Avenue Field, which is made up of artificial turf. At 4 p.m. in the cold rain Chatham came to the plate as the visiting team—the game had originally been scheduled as a home contest for Madison.

Alex St. Romain started the inning off by drawing a walk. After stealing both second and third base, she scored the team's first run after a Kelly Winans RBI ground out. While Madison was able to string together a few singles, the Dodgers were unable to score in the first.

After exchanging a pair of three up, three down half innings in the second, St. Romain led off the third inning in a more dramatic fashion then she had the first. She hit a long fly ball which looked as though it would have cleared the fence at the Cougars' primary field at Chatham Middle School.

As the ball rolled to the end of the turf, St. Romain hustled around the bases for her first home run since returning from an injured elbow earlier in the year.

After another one-two-three inning, the Cougars went into the fourth up by two runs.

Caroline Murphy led off the inning by advancing to second on an overthrow. McCall Moore was called in to run for Murphy and advanced to third base on a Jenna Ioffredo bloop single. Moore soon came home on a Madison wild pitch to put the Cougars up by three.

After Chatham scored four more runs on three walks and a number of errors, Ioffredo was at the plate again, this time with the bases loaded. She hit a hard single up the middle that scored Kelly Winans and Cara Delsandro for the team's eighth and ninth runs.

"We had a little more discipline looking for low pitches and driving the ball," Head Coach Alexis Davies said of her team. "A lot of it is pitch selection."

Madison struck back in the bottom of the inning, though, as Julianna Vezza drew a walk and Nikki Caruso hit a long fly ball to right field that turned into a two-run home run when she hustled around the bases..

Amanda Fazio struck out two of the next three batters to end the inning.

"I just needed to settle down and try to get them [the Madison batters] the next time they came up," Fazio said.

St. Romain came to the plate in the fifth with one out and lined a hard double to right field. She was then able to take third base on a wild pitch and then came home on another wild one, making the score 10-2. The scored remained that way until the final out.

In the seventh, St. Romain had to be taken out of the game after straining a hamstring running to first, but she did her real damage with her bat during the game.

With the win, Chatham remains undefeated in conference play. The Cougars will face Mt. St. Dominic Academy in regular season play at 4 p.m. on Thursday in an away game.