By Bobby Mathews, Sports Editor
LEEDS — The Green Wave drew a tough bracket in their own tournament, facing a Chelsea team that had beaten them 3-0 the previous evening. For a while, it looked like Leeds was about to avenge that loss, jumping ahead 3-0 early before Chelsea made a pitching change and the Hornets fired back for a 5-3 victory as time ran out.
Under the Greenwave Classic rules, tournament games have a 70-minute “drop dead” rule, meaning that the game stops immediately once the time limit has been reached.
Leeds went up 2-0 in the first when Maddie Payne doubled and drove in Zoie Galloway. Then in the second inning, starting pitcher Emma Machen singled. Her courtesy runner, India Rogers, stole second and then third — and then went home on a Katelyn Howard single.
Up 3-0, Galloway says she felt the team may have relaxed a little.
“The first pitcher, I think we saw the ball better against her because we saw her yesterday,” Galloway said. “We kind of adjusted to her pitching and we made a lot more contact than we did yesterday … we were up, and I think we thought we had the game in the bag, and we kind of just slowed down to their game.”
A number of things went wrong for the Green Wave, as a throwing error ended up with a baseball in the Leeds dugout, allowing the first run to score for Chelsea. Hornets took advantage of a dispirited Leeds squad to surge ahead for the victory.
“We have to do a better job of playing faster on defense,” Leeds coach Erin Wright said afterward. “It’s a standard we’ve set, it’s a standard the kids have set. We have to do a better job on that.”