Ryan Murken

Your Prep Sports

SOLON – Solon got a gutty pitching performance from Kayla West and a home run from eighth-grader Hilary Wilson in the finale of its home tournament on Saturday afternoon but it wasn’t quite enough to get the Spartans a win.

Class 3A fourth-ranked West Liberty scored single runs in the first and fourth innings and held on for a 2-1 win over No. 8 Solon in the final game of the Solon Classic that was shortened to one day by Friday’s rain.

The win was the 13th straight for West Liberty and improved the Comets to 18-1 on the season while Solon dropped to 18-10.

“We have some things we need to clean up a little bit,” Solon coach Erin White said. “We aren’t where we want to be yet but we are working our way to where we want to go.”

The loss was the second of the day to a top-10 team for the Spartans who dropped their opener 6-3 to 5A seventh-ranked Ottumwa.

Despite the setbacks White was pleased with the play on Saturday especially the pitching of West and freshman Carly Ellison.

“Winning and losing is completely out of your control, I firmly believe that,” White said. “It’s hard to walk away when the kids want to win so bad but there were so many things that we saw today that we can go back and work on tomorrow and our kids are doing what they need to do and we are right there.

West Liberty took a 1-0 lead in the first inning without hitting a ball out of the infield.

Haylee Lehman led off with an infield single and scored on an infield single by Austyn Crees.

The third infield single of the inning came off the bat of Macy Akers and was lined off the lower leg of West.

“She was fantastic,” White said of West. “Mentally she was so strong. You know you are going to have adversity and she had adversity and I thought she handled it fantastically. I was so proud of her.”

West stayed in the game for six more innings following the line drive off her leg, holding the Comets to one run on eight hits while striking out seven without walking a batter.

“She is a pretty special kid,” White said. “She wants to work and she’ll work as hard as you will let her work. She has really done a great job of working with Emily Ira as our pitching coach. They work really well together and it’s been great to see them working together.”

West Liberty took a 2-0 lead in the fourth when Akers and Sailor Hall led off the inning with consecutive singles and Akers scored on an RBI ground out by Brittney Harned.

Solon threatened in the fifth when Taylor Moore led off with a single and Ava Stebral singled down the right field line but Spartans left them stranded.

“We weren’t super sharp yet today and that’s the exciting thing for a coach to see is that we aren’t at our max yet,” White said. “We still have a lot of room to grow.”

Solon cut the lead in half when Wilson hammered a solo home run, her fifth of the season, over the left field fence with two out in the sixth.

“We played at Roland-Story last week and it was a rough weekend and we took some losses and coming back this week we had a lot of hard practices and we had a lot of younger girls take it upon themselves to step their games up,” Solon senior center fielder Taylor Ryan said. “I think a lot of us made mental jumps and a lot of our younger girls have mentally stepped up their games a lot.”

The home run by Wilson was the last base runner West Liberty starter Isabelle True would allow.

True retired the final four batters and struck out nine in a complete game three-hitter.

West Liberty    100  100  0  –  2  8  0

Solon               000  001  0  –  1  3  0

W – Isabelle True                    L – Kayla West

HR – SOL: Hilary Wilson

Ottumwa        000  500  1  –  6  9  0

Solon             300  000  0  –  3  4  2

W – Kacy Nickerson               L – Carly Ellison

2B – SOL: Hilary Wilson. OTT: Kacy Nickerson

HR – SOL: Taylor Moore

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