Lady Tigers falter against Columbia

The Columbia Lady Wildcats handed Mountain Home its first conference loss of the young softball season, as they pounded the Lady Tigers 13-4 Thursday at Columbia.

Columbia only outhit the Lady Tigers 14-9, but took advantage of a few errors and timely hitting for the win.

Columbia scored in every inning but the fourth, while the Lady Tigers, who hit the ball hard, but usually right at a defender, scored three in the third and added another run in the fifth.

"It was a tough one," said Mountain Home coach Chris Asbury in radio comments after the game, "but you can't take anything away from Columbia. They swung the bats well today. Unfortunately, we had some issues on defense -- but still it might be a 9-4 game -- and we failed at situational hitting.

"We had lots of opportunities, but didn't come through. We hit a lot of hard balls and put the ball in play, but had a lot of 'at 'em' balls today and couldn't get many scoring opportunities to pan out."

Caitlyn Sheehy led the Lady Tigers at the plate with two hits, including a triple, and drove in one run. Krissy Elliott had an RBI-double. Courtney Christiansen had a single and two RBIs, and Madison Siefferman, Madi Karst, Alex Stenvold, Rachel Warila and Brittany Karst also had hits.

Heather Adams gave up 13 runs for the Lady Tigers, nine of them earned, on 14 hits to suffer the loss, just her second against eight wins.

The loss dropped the Lady Tigers to 4-1 in conference and 8-5 on the season. Their game last week at home against Kuna was washed out by the weather. It has been rescheduled for April 22 at Memmelaar Field.

The Lady Tigers hosted Skyview Tuesday and go to Bishop Kelly this Thursday in conference play.