Chesterton softball pushes No. 1-ranked defending state champion Crown Point to the limit, rallies for two runs in the seventh and falls just short, 4-3

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The Chesterton softball team hit the road Wednesday, stood toe to toe with the No. 1 team in the state 4A poll and didn’t back down for the entirety of seven suspenseful innings.
The game ended with Chesterton having the tying run in scoring position, and Crown Point escaped with a 4-3 victory that showed just how far the Trojans have progressed.
“We’ve come so far since my freshman year. We have improved so much,” second baseman Lexi Smith said. “We put in so much hard work and I’m really happy to see us come this far.”
Said second-year head coach Erin Cochran: “We’re leaving today happy. Yes, it’s a loss, but if we keep chipping away at them, sooner or later, we’ll be the four and they’ll be the three.”
When one team has a dominant strikeout pitcher and the other doesn’t, so much must go right for the team without one to remain competitive.
And that’s what happened.
First, the pitcher must induce grounders to keep the ball from clearing the fence. Sophomore Peyton Cherep answered that call, going the distance and allowing four runs, three earned. She surrendered two home runs, but for the most part did a nice job of throwing grounders.
The next thing needed is for the defense to turn the grounders into outs. Led by senior shortstop Lila Miller, the Trojans did an excellent job of that. Miller stopped screaming liners and grounders alike and she was far from alone in supplying web gems.
Third baseman Jillian Pittman made a diving stop of a hard-hopper to keep it from reaching the outfield and followed that with a stop of a screaming line drive. Smith made a skidding stop of a ball hit up the middle and fired to first for the out. Right fielder Maddie Nichols raced toward the gap to run down a ball that had trouble written on it.
Kaydence Ford gunned down a runner at the plate from center field.
“Kaydence and Maddie did a good job of talking to each other and were able to call each other off on flyballs,” Cochran said.
The next and most difficult thing that needed to go well for the Trojans to remain competitive was to find a way to put the bat on the ball against a pitcher as dominant as Crown Point’s Paige Liezert (6-0), who came out of the game with 73 strikeouts in 36 innings.
This one took a while. For three innings plus two outs, Liezert did what she does, which is to say dominate on her way to a 16-strikeout day.
And then junior Pittman, Chesterton’s No. 3 hitter for a reason, settled in at the plate in the fourth inning, her second at bat against the power pitcher who had struck her out in the first inning.
Pittman fouled a pitch straight back, a sign, Pittman said, that “you’ve got your stance down and everything’s on time, and that’s hard for me against her. Last year, I struggled against her a lot. She’s faster than what I would normally see during travel, but I guess this year I got it all one time.”
That she did. Pittman cranked a home run well over the fence in left-center to tie the game 1-1. Eva Govert had given Crown Point a 1-0 lead with a homer to left in the second.
The Bulldogs regained the lead with a run in the bottom of the fourth, aided by the Trojans’ one costly defensive miscue on what would have been a force play.
The score remained 2-1 until Crown Point’s Anna Neal hit a two-run homer to left in the sixth.
Chesterton was staring at a three-run deficit with only three outs remaining against the defending state champions, enough to make a team lacking confidence go through the motions and head for the bus.
Not this team.
With one out, Pittman scorched a grounder down the line that popped out of the third baseman’s glove for the Bulldogs’ lone error. Hannah Florian followed by lashing a single to center and with two outs Smith ripped a double to left that scored two runs and the Trojans fell one single shy of tying it.
“We came back with a ferocity that last inning,” Smith said. “We put up a good fight against a good team.”
Pittman: “It’s a little tough to take, but they’re a pretty good team and we definitely held them better than we did last year and the year before, so I’m proud. We put up three runs, and not just off a home run, off of Lexi’s hit and Hannah’s hit, too.”
The Trojans (2-3) return home Saturday for a doubleheader vs. Illiana Christian. The first game is scheduled for 10 a.m.