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Softball: Bryan County brush past Portal, 8-2
softball
The Long County Lady Tide had a six-game winning streak going before last week.

It took a while but Bryan County’s bats finally warmed to the task as the Redskins rolled to their fifth straight win last Thursday, an 8-2 win over Portal at Redskins Field.

Cam Parker ignited the win with a two-run homer, her eighth of the season, to cap a three-run fifth inning that snapped a 1-1 tie in the Region 3A-DII game. Bryan County (8-5, 3-2) then put it out of reach with a four-run outburst in the sixth that featured five hits and some shaky fielding by the Panthers.

The win surged Bryan County into fourth-place in the region race, just ahead of the Panthers (3-5, 2-3), to set up a crucial week in which it’ll have an opportunity to play the three teams ahead of it.

After a non-region game at home on Wednesday against Statesboro the Redskins will go on the road for a game at defending state champion Emanuel County Institute (10-2, 6-0) on Thursday. Next week Bryan County will have home games on Tuesday and Thursday against Metter (5-4, 4-1) and Screven County (5-4, 4-1), respectively.

In the latest MaxPrep rankings ECI is No. 2 in the state in Class A-DII while Screven County is eighth, Metter is at No. 12 and Bryan County checks in at No. 15. This will be the Redskins’ first meeting with ECI while they lost by one run at Metter and at Screven. In both of those games they led going into the bottom of the seventh.

“This was a big win for us,” Coach Jessica Schroeder-Cooper said after beating Portal. “This was our second straight game without an error and that was important. So above all else all the runs (69 previous four games) we’ve been putting across we’ve been giving up too many. Tonight, we gave up only two and that was big.”

Sophomore pitcher Lila Hannah turned in another strong performance as she continues to be a pleasant surprise. She limited the Panthers, who scored a run in the first and seventh innings, to only three hits and at one point retired 15 straight hitters.

“Lila pitched really well,” Cooper said. “She’s been looking good for us here her last couple of outings. She keeps putting us in position to win ball games.

“She keeps getting ground balls and popups and tonight our defense played really well behind her,” Cooper said. “The bats were a little quiet as it took us a couple of bats to get going but we got going at the right time. That was a good pitcher we faced.”

Portal got a run in the first on Rebie Grace Pylant’s sacrifice fly and Emma Johnson stymied the Redskins until the fourth when they finally tied the game thanks to Eris Deal’s two-out single which scored Parker who had led off with a walk and advanced to third on a wild pitch and fielder’s choice.

Bryan County got all the runs it needed in the fifth. Freshman Emma Into made it 2-1 when she scored on the front end of a double steal which saw Liz Harvey taking second. After McKinley Walker struck out Parker unloaded on a 1-2 pitch with the ball clearing the fence in dead center with ease.

Any hopes the Panthers had of pulling it out were dashed in the sixth when Bryan County sent nine batters to the plate scoring four runs. Harvey had an RBI with a sacrifice fly, two runs scored on errors and the final run of the inning scored on a wild pitch.

Bryan County had 10 hits, eight of them coming in its final two times at bat, with Emily Johnson going 3-for-4 and the slap hitting in two, beating out two choppers.