Lady Tigers go one for two during week

Last week saw the Mountain Home Lady Tigers split their conference games and lose a non-conference game to Twin Falls.

Lady Tigers 2

Bishop Kelly 5

The Mountain Home Lady Tigers dropped a 5-2 conference softball game to Bishop Kelly last Tuesday at Bishop Kelly.

The game was a good pitching duel between Mountain Home's Nickayla Skinner and Bishop Kelly's Britney Croner. Croner helped herself out at the plate with two RBI singles. She struck out 14 batters and limited Mountain Home to just three hits. One of those hits was a two-run home run by Sammy Dodge that brought the Lady Tigers back within one, 3-2, in the top of the sixth.

Nickayla Skinner, who ended the game with 12 strikeouts, got the first two batters out in the bottom of the sixth, but then Bishop Kelly put together four straight hits to score two runs and push the Lady Knights' lead back to 5-2.

Mountain Home got their lead off batter on base in the top of the seventh, but the next three batters made outs.

"It was a tough game," said Mountain Home Lady Tiger softball coach Joy Memmelaar in radio comments after the game. "It kind of came out how we were thinking. We hit the ball much better today, and the girls had worked hard on outside pitches, because she really killed us on the outside pitches last time. We put the ball in play more often. We need to not give them extra outs in every inning, which caused them to score some extra runs they really shouldn't have had, but all in all, I thought they did very well."

Besides Sammy Dodge's home run, Kim Hamilton and Kelsey Hopkins had hits for Mountain Home.

Lady Tigers 1

Emmett 0

Nickayla Skinner threw her second straight shutout against Emmett, beating the Lady Huskies, 1-0, last Thursday at Emmett.

The Lady Tiger freshman, who beat Emmett, 2-0, back on April 3, blanked them, 1-0, striking out nine and scattering four hits to improve to 12-3 on the season, and lowering her earned run average to 2.10. Skinner also had two hits in the game.

Mountain Home got their only run off Emmett's Mattingly in the third inning, when Kim Hamilton scored on Ashley Christiansen's hit.

"It was a big win for us," said Coach Memmelaar. Emmett was right behind us (in conference), and Nick got her job done, both offensively and defensively, and the rest of the team did, also. We left more runners on board than we would have liked, but that was their half of the pitching duel."

Nickayla Skinner, Ashley Christiansen and and Tiffany Smith each had two hits, Christiansen an RBI, and Kim Hamilton, Ashley Kipp and Krista Gillaspy also had hits.

Twin Falls 15

Mtn. Home 1

Twin Falls exploded for nine runs in the fourth inning and added five more in the fifth to down the Lady Tigers, 15-1 in five innings Saturday at Eastside Park.

Breann Christiansen made her first start of the season for Mountain Home, and had the Lady Bruins off balance until the fourth inning when a combination of walks, errors and timely hitting opened things up for Twin Falls. Sara Harlan finished off the game in the circle for Mountain Home.

Mountain Home's lone run came in the bottom of the fifth inning. Tiffany Smith's single scored Sara Harlan who had walked and moved to third when Kim Hamilton reached on an error.

"She did really well," said Coach Memmelaar after the game, talking of Breann's pitching effort. "She hasn't pitched in a game all year, and we just figured maybe throwing something slow at them might change them up a little bit, and it did, for longer than I thought, but then the second time around the bottom of his lineup started getting on her. We wanted to get some other kids some playing time in that they might not get, and give them a chance to show us what they can still do, and a loss is a loss, it's not good, but some nice things came out of it. We saw what some of the kids could do, and we did manage to score a run there at the end so we didn't get shut out."

Mountain Home managed only two hits off the Twin Falls pitcher Katelyn Fjeld. Sammy Dodge broke up her no-hitter with a single with one out in the fourth inning. Fjeld struck out five and walked three.

Breann Christiansen struck out two and walked eight and gave up just three hits. Sara Harlan had one strikeout and walked three batters, giving up six hits.

The Lady Tigers took a 14-7 overall and 9-3 conference record to Middleton yesterday. They close out their regular season tomorrow at home against Nampa.