Hartington girls prepare for trip to State softball tournament

HARTINGTON — With a few weeks to ready themselves for the Class D state tournament, the Hartington Penguins 18U softball team has plenty of data to look at in preparation for the big show.

The state tournament will take place July 14-16 in Hastings and head coach Bryce Grutsch will now work with the girls in preparation after several games were canceled due to scheduling conflicts.

“The girls are too wore out,” he said. “They will practice from now till state as much as we can. Like the 12’s, I’ll look for some games, hopefully we can find a couple.”

Last Tuesday, the local squad fell to Osmond 9-5 and then were dropped by Creighton 17-5 two days later.

“I felt like our approach at the plate wasn’t good enough despite Hazel Hochstein hitting her first ever home run,” Grutsch said of the home loss to Osmond. “We let too many pitches go by that we should have swung at and swung at too many that we should have let go by. We’ve been working on that all year. One game we’re pretty good with the bat in our hands and the next we just aren’t dialed in enough to have a quality at bat.

“Every time we play Creighton, I tell them we will have to play pretty clean to stay with them. We felt OK getting two runs in the top half of the first inning, then getting their leadoff batter out on a ground ball to first. Then between good hits, walked batters, and errors it was 11-2 after one inning.”

Creighton was benefitted from two grand slams hit in the opening frame.

“Disappointing, because that was our last game before State but it looked like the team handled OK,” Grutsch said. “You could see they were disappointed but they didn’t seem to be hanging their heads about it either. Learn from it. On to state now.”

The coach noted the play of Alexys Hahne in the circle as a highlight to the season as of now – along with 12s pitcher Kiersten Hans.

“We’ve been able to count on those two pitchers all year,” Grutsch said. “When the chips are down and you need them. They’ll come through for you more times than not.”

The 12s played in a tournament in Crofton last weekend and bashed Bloomfield 15-0 before falling 5-4 to the hosts.

“We played pretty well but just ran out of time – games have an hour clock,” Grutsch said. In the losers bracket, where they used an 11-run final frame to roll to a 14-4 win. They then dropped a 4-1 decision to Wakefield.

“I was happy with how the girls played,” Grutsch said. “Maybe not with finishing fourth, but we played four games in a row with no breaks in between games. By the last game it was starting to show. Not so much in the physical effort but in the little attention to detail stuff. Missing a sign, or not advancing a base when we could have.

“It was just really hot, players were getting overheated and we needed a break. You don’t get breaks when you’re coming up through the losers bracket. Individually, pitching was good. Ella Kelly pitched the whole first game for us. Kiersten finished the day. Both were solid. Hadley Grutsch had one of her better days at first base that she’s had all season. She did a nice job stepping up and moving to catcher in the last game when our starting catcher got overheated and had to come out.”

Earlier in the week, the 12s lost to Osmond 9-8 and beat Bloomfield 25-3.

“We have around a week and half or two weeks before we head to state,” Coach Grutsch said of his 12s. “We’ll mostly just practice two or three times per week leading up to it. I wouldn’t mind finding one game the week of but that’s probably not real likely. It gets hard to find games in July.”

The 6s, 8s, 10s all played in league tournaments over the weekend but results were not available at press time, however the 8U first team finished in third place while the 8U second team took fourth.