ORLANDO, Fla. – The Haverford College softball team split its two contests on Friday to close the Spring Break portion of the team's 2018 schedule. The Fords (8-2) edged out Eastern Connecticut State by a 9-8 score in nine innings before falling to TCNJ in the final game of the trip.
Friday's results closed a very successful trip for the Fords. The team will now look to bring its momentum from the Sunshine State back to Pennsylvania for the remainder of the spring season. Haverford will next travel to Alvernia this coming Tuesday for a scheduled 3 p.m. doubleheader. That will mark the first of four true road doubleheaders for the team before the schedule flips to the majority of the games being played at home during the final month of the regular season.
In Haverford's eighth win of the trip over Eastern Connecticut State, the Fords were able to capture a back-and-forth 9-8 victory with two runs in the bottom of the ninth as Julia Blake capped her 4-for-4 game at the plate with a two-run hit that scored both Ashley Sisto and Nicole Swisher. Blake finished that game with four RBI and three more runs scored.
Starting off the game down 4-0 after the top of the first, Haverford got three of those runs back in the bottom half of the frame and took the lead with two more in the second. A two-run double from Blake opened Haverford's offense while Marybeth Stone followed that up with an RBI groundout. Stone added two more RBI to her total with a double into right field that scored Blake and Swisher the following inning.
Haverford got another RBI groundout from Jessica Koshinski in the fifth to take a momentary 6-5 lead, but Eastern Connecticut State came right back to tie the game in the top of the sixth. Both teams scored in the eighth with the international tiebreaker rule in effect. Rachel Wolfson had the RBI knock in that inning for the Fords. Eastern Connecticut also scored its runner placed on second to start the ninth while Haverford had its placed runner put out a second. Nevertheless, singles from Swisher and Sisto set the table for Blake who found green in left field to secure the walk-off victory.
In the final game of the trip against TCNJ, the Fords could seemingly not keep the high-powered opposition off of the scoreboard. The Lions tallied multiple runs during each inning against a Haverford team that had allowed just 29 runs through the first eight games of the trip.
Haverford had its own two-run inning to start things off in the top of the first as Nicole Swisher and Julia Blake began the game with walks. Marybeth Stone lifted a fly ball to centerfield to score the first run of the game on a sacrifice fly while Jessica Koshinski had a two-out RBI single to plate the other. Haverford's third run of the game came with Emma Souter hit her second home run of the trip during the top of the fourth. Rachel Wolfson went 2-for-3 against the Lions as a leader on the Fords' offense.