The Hampton-Dumont-CAL baseball and softball teams struck early and closed out a pair of great outings with wins over Clarion-Goldfield-Dows on Wednesday.
The HD-CAL baseball team tracked down their first win of the season, 8-4 over CGD on Wednesday. At the plate Jaxon Moats brought home three RBI on two extra base hits. The Bulldogs also received a quality start from Dawson Wikert who worked 6 ⅓ innings allowing only two earned runs with 9 strikeouts.
Head Coach Matt Lokenvitz says pitching and building on confidence will be big part of a busy stretch of games ahead.
“Starting pitchers have to get through five innings for us in order for us to really be successful,” says Lokenvitz. “When you’re gonna play ten games in eleven days you got to pitch deep into games and do those types of things. When score eight runs you’re gonna win a lot of games, so obviously with the bats and putting four up in the first inning helps you kind of calm everybody down those nerves, that’ll really help us moving forward. We know we’ve got great competition coming up here throughout these next couple weeks. Every win that we can build on and some momentum we can build on gives these kids confidence. When you have confidence on the baseball diamond, you’re a pretty good team.”
The HD-CAL softball team returned to .500 at 2-2 with a 9-0 shutout victory over CGD on Wednesday night. On an active night on the base pads with four steals, Malie Ott had 2 RBI. Aspen Harlan threw a one hit complete game with 8 strikeouts for the Bulldogs.
Head Coach Kelsey Enslin says players in new positions adjusted well and scoring early helped propel the team to the win.
“Aspen had pitched a little bit for us this season, with her and Mallie rotating, but we went ahead and made a switch tonight and had her go first,” says Enslin. “That was actually the first full game that she’s pitched, she did a great job out there, she hit her spots well and worked through it. That put Mallie in a different spot at first and she was really engaged in the game and had a ton of plays there and Emma behind the plate, everybody in those new positions did a really good job. I challenged them yesterday, we have to start better. For us to come out and score right away and shut them out, it was something we really were focusing on. It was really good to see.”
Both teams will be at Algona on Friday. First pitch is at 7:30 p.m.
