St Lucy’s Softball Team Struggles To Find Its Offense in 10-0 Loss

It has not been a favorable five game stretch for the St. Lucy's Priory Varsity softball team. Despite beginning the week with a 7-2 win over Rowland High School, the Regents fell 10-0 in their latest game to the Chino Hills Huskies Wednesday afternoon at Big League Dreams.

 “You can see from today’s game, we’re struggling quite a bit to find our identity.” Said coach Ryan Nuveman following the loss.

“We’re not hitting the ball right now, we got one hit again today and we had a total of nine hits in five out of our six losses, nine hits in 72 innings, that’s not going to get it done and that’s why we’re under .500 right now and battling to get there.”

The Regents (3-6, 2-3) are trying to keep up with both South Hills and Chino Hills in the competitive Sierra League, but it’s been an uphill battle as both those schools have jumped to a 3-0 record while St. Lucy’s, a pre-season favorite, has had to contend with their share of offensive woes.

St. Lucy’s fell behind 1-0 following a solo homerun scored by freshman Patricia Parks in the bottom half of the first inning and saw their chance to even the score disappear in the third inning when their only base runner of the afternoon was picked off.

That inning started on a promising note for the Regents when junior Katie Lange ripped a line drive down the first base line and was later sacrificed into scoring position.

However, despite getting a solid shot by sophomore Vanessa Landa, the Huskies’ third baseman made a play on the ball and Chino Hills subsequently picked off Lange for the final out of the inning.

“I’m not too upset at my runner for getting picked off but it certainly hurt, it didn’t help our chances,” said Nuveman who called the play a turning point.

The second half of the fourth inning was a big one for Chino Hills as they drove in five runs on three hits to increase their lead to 6-1. They went on to score four more runs the following inning to put the game out of reach.  

The mercy rule was invoked after St. Lucy’s fell behind 10 runs after five innings.

Nuveman said he was placing the responsibility for the loss on himself while at the same time he praised the host team.

“They played good defense, I’m not taking anything away from them, they’re a heck of a team, but I didn’t expect this," Nuveman said. "We’ve had two games where we’ve been mercied this year and we didn’t get mercied last year once. I don’t expect that to happen again, but it’s definitely deflating and embarrassing."

The Regents’ bats were all but silenced by junior pitcher Nikki Innamorato who finished the game with six strikeouts. Junior Danielle O’Toole was the losing pitcher.

Nuveman said St Lucy’s needs to make some strategic changes in their approach to the games and they have to become more forceful at the plate.

“I think we’re taking too many pitches, we need to be more aggressive and swing at pitches early in the count,” he said, adding that getting a lot of players returning from last season should help the team in future games.

The Regents will try to bounce back on Tuesday when they host league leading South Hills at 3:30 p.m.

BOX SCORE:

SCHOOL        1    2    3      4     5          R   H   E 

St. Lucy’s      0     0    0     0    0            0    1    0       

Chino Hills    1     0    0     5    4            10  11   0