AUGUSTA — The Skowhegan Area High School softball team was not going to sit back and watch Arika Brochu work her magic.
The Cony star pitcher has been one of the best in the state this season, and the Indians entered Tuesday’s Eastern Class A championship determined to get their money’s worth in at-bats against Brochu.
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“She was not going to throw the ball by us,” Skowhegan coach Lee Johnson said. “We were not going to let her play catch with the catcher.
“She’s going to throw the ball in the strike zone and we’re going to hit it. That was our mentality for the past two days.”
In front of a packed field at Cony Family Field the Indians turned practice into performance, holding on for a 3-2 victory over the Rams and their second straight Eastern A title.
Skowhegan sent 35 hitters to the plate and 21 swung at the first pitch from Brochu — with no one serving as a better example of the Indians strategy than senior Morgan Buker.
The tall left fielder saw 12 pitches in four at-bats against Brochu and swung at 11 of them, going 2-for-4 with two runs scored.
“(Coach told us) don’t be scared,” Buker said, “be focused, you’re more than ready.”
Undoubtedly the biggest swing from Buker came in the top of the second inning.
Doubles from Mikayla Toth and Taylor Johnson in the top of the first allowed Skowhegan to take an early 1-0 lead, but Cony came right back and tied the game in the bottom half when Alyssah Dennett scored on a wild pitch.
Emma Fitzgerald led off the second inning with a fly out to left, bringing up Buker.
After fouling off the first offering from Brochu, Buker turned on a fastball and launched it about 15 feet over the fence in left-center field.
“I knew it felt really good when I hit but I didn’t know it was gone,” Buker said. “I just wanted to scream.”
In addition to giving the Indians the lead back, it also proved to them that they could hang with Cony and Brochu.
“When you hit a home run off that kid it makes her look like normal,” Johnson said. “That was the effect that it had on our kids. When Morgan ripped that thing over the fence I kids said, ‘look, she’s just like any other pitcher we’ve seen.’ Maybe just a little harder.”
The Rams beat Skowhegan three times earlier this season — including a 10-0 Cony win in the Kennebec Valley Athletic Conference A game on June 7 — and had rolled their way to the Eastern A finals as the No. 1 seed.
“It boosted our confidence a lot,” Buker said. “Once one of us gets a hit, we all just hit and we just keep going. We get on a roll.”
Buker once again got the team going in the fourth, roping a single to left to start the inning. After a strikeout from Bonnie-Jane Aiken, Renee Wright executed the second of her three sacrifice bunts in the game to move Buker to second.
Toth followed with her second double of the game to score Buker from second and giving Skowhegan a 3-1 lead.
In the bottom of the fifth the Rams threatened to take the lead for the first time in the game, as Autumn Sudsbury scored with two outs to cut the deficit in half on a ball hit to right by Olivia Deeves.
Deeves’ hit was just out of the reach of Wright in right, and she ended up on third on the play. Brochu followed with a walk and ran directly to second with no throw from Skowhegan. Kaitlyn Therriault — who allowed just two hits on 121 pitches in the game — got out of the jam though, getting Kassidy Turgeon to pop out to Aiken at third to end the threat.
It would prove to be the last great scoring chance for Cony, who went down in order in each of the next two innings with only one ball getting out of the infield.
“We just needed a big hit and we didn’t get that big hit,” Gaslin said. “There’s a lot of pressure in these games, they’re young kids and unfortunately we just didn’t get that hit today.”
Even with the lead, Buker admits they were far from at ease.
“We were nervous,” Buker said. “Me and Mikayla in the outfield were shaking. We were more than nervous.”
Dealing with nerves is nothing new for the Indians though, as all three wins for second-seeded Skowhegan in the tournament have come by just a single run.
It’s a trend Johnson and his team will be hoping to continue Saturday when they face Thornton at 4 p.m. at St. Joseph’s College for the state championship.
“We have to score one more run than they do,” Johnson said.
As for Cony — which finishes 15-4 — it was a great season even though it didn’t end with a win in the Rams’ final game.
“We had a hell of a season,” Gaslin said. “We had about five comeback victories. If you looked at us at the beginning of the year our defense was horrible and we’ve come a long ways.
“This was one big game that could have gone either way. Unfortunately, when you play a team four times it’s hard to beat them four times.”
Evan Crawley — 621-5640
ecrawley@mainetoday.com
Twitter: Evan_Crawley
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