REGIONAL- The North Woods softball team pulled off a big first-round upset in the Section 7A tournament on Tuesday, as the tenth-seeded Grizzlies defeated the seventh-seeded Cromwell-Wright Cardinals 11-9 at Cherry.
North Woods took the lead in the second inning when Emarie Gibson and Addison Burckhardt both reached base on C-W errors and scored for a 2-0 advantage. The Cardinals responded with a run in the bottom half of the inning, but North Woods plated Gibson and Evalyn Thiel in the top of the third to go up 4-1. After a pair of Cardinals’ runs, North Woods went up 5-3 in the top of the fourth when Kayla Dougherty singled and scored.
But the Cardinals flipped the game upside down in the bottom of the fifth, sending ten batters to the plate in a six-run onslaught that chased Grizzlies’ starter Gibson from the mound and put C-W ahead 9-5.
North Woods, however, would fight back, tying the score at 9-9 in the top of the drawing walks and capitalizing on a Cardinals error to bring Nevada Gauthier, Ella Kruse, Gibson and Burckhardt home for scores. Coming on in relief of Gibson, Burckhardt struck out the side in the bottom half of the inning.
The Grizzlies went ahead 11-9 in the top of the seventh thanks to keen eyes at the plate by Dougherty and Gauthier, who both drew walks and scored. Burkhardt again figured in all three Cardinals outs in their last at-bat, catching a popper and ringing up the last two batters on strike outs to send the Grizzlies into the second round of the tournament against the second-seeded Cherry Tigers.
The Tigers have been getting votes in the Minnesota Fastpitch Coaches Association weekly polls, and rated sixth in the state in the Quality Ratings Factor used to seed tournament play, they presented a formidable challenge for North Woods.
The Grizzlies’ bats have been both hot and cold this season. They picked up a 12-2 win at Chisholm and a 17-5 win at Cook County last week, but also fell 12-1 to International Falls in their last regular season game on Friday.
Against one of the state’s best nines, cold wasn’t what North Woods needed, but that’s what they got in an 11-0 loss. Zoey Burckhardt got on base with a walk in the fourth inning, and Rory Bundy connected for the team’s only hit, a single in the fifth.
The win against C-W, however, put the Grizzlies in a position to keep playing as they dropped into the tournament’s elimination bracket, where they were scheduled to face Mt. Iron-Buhl on Thursday.