Green Valley rides late rally to key victory over Liberty

The Green Valley softball team has been red-hot offensively for the last two weeks. That didn’t change Thursday.

But this time, it took the Gators seven innings to finally get their bats warmed up.

Green Valley erupted for six runs in the top of the seventh inning in a come-from-behind 8-4 win over host Liberty in a Southeast League game.

The victory, coupled with Foothill’s 5-4 win over second-place Silverado, puts the Gators (22-6, 10-2 Southeast) alone in first place.

Green Valley also is two games clear of third-place Liberty (20-10, 8-4) with two regular-season games left.

“I think we’ve found when it really comes down to it, most of our girls are really good under pressure,” said sophomore outfielder Lace Jordan, who went 3-for-4, including a two-run triple in the seventh that put Green Valley up 6-3.

“From inning one until the last inning, we kept fighting through,” she said.

The Gators had scored 48 runs in their last five games but were held in check through six innings by Liberty pitchers Breanna English and Robin Lowery. However, Green Valley sent 11 batters to the plate in the seventh to overcome a 3-2 Patriots lead.

Jacqui Cappuccilli singled in Kayla Anderson to tie the game, and Annamarie Smith scored on a bang-bang play after a wild pitch to put the Gators up 4-3. Three batters later, Jordan hit her triple before Liberty’s defense, which was solid through the first six innings, broke down.

Jordan scored on an error, and, two batters later, Anderson added a run-scoring single.

“If we would have won, we felt like we would have been playing Silverado for the league title (on Monday),” Patriots coach Kris Jensen said. “We’ve been doing a good job of playing in the moment and taking it inning by inning, but I thought we got ahead of ourselves a little bit today.”

Green Valley pitcher Alicia Firelein struck out eight and gave up seven hits. Four of those came in the bottom of the fourth inning, when

Liberty took a 3-1 lead on a two-run double by Nikki Blindeagle and a run-scoring single to right by Carson Cooper.

“Firelein had command of a good off-speed pitch and riser, and that makes her a lot harder to hit,” Jensen said.