BATH — The Morse softball team ended Oak Hill’s season in the Class B South quarterfinals last season.
History repeated itself Thursday afternoon.
The No. 4 Shipbuilders got timely hitting and strong pitching from Dory Kulis in a 7-0 victory over the No. 5 Raiders.
Kulis surrendered two hits, while fanning 10 in a complete game gem. The sophomore was also part of a middle of the order that went 6-for-9.
Morse improved to 13-4 and will face No. 1 Wells (12-5), winners over No. 9 Cape Elizabeth, in the regional semifinals on Saturday. Oak Hill ends its season at 13-4.
Oak Hill pitcher Sadie Waterman kept the Morse hitters in check early, allowing just a second-inning hit to Julia Goddard. However, the fourth inning was a different story. Morse cleanup hitter Marissa Parks led off with a long single to right-center and Abby Carpenter followed with a single. A sacrifice bunt attempt by the Shipbuilders was mishandled, allowing Parks to score from second with the game’s first run. Another error led to the second run of the inning.
“Defensively, we made a couple of miscues with runners on base, and it really hurt us,” Oak Hill coach Allyson Collins said.
With runners on first and second, Goddard came to the plate, and after two unsuccessful attempts to lay down a sacrifice bunt, she took a two-strike pitch and rapped an RBI single to right field to give her team a 3-0 lead.
“I told her she has two tries to get it down, if she couldn’t, then hit a ground ball to the right side to move the runners,” Morse head coach Will Laffely said.
Kulis closed out the fifth inning with a pair of strikeouts, giving her seven.
“In our league, we don’t see pitching of this caliber very much, especially of that speed and we couldn’t lay off that high heat,” Collins said. “If we could have done that, I think we would have done better, but we just couldn’t lay off it.”
“I play with many of them on a travel team, so it helps I know what they like and don’t,” the Morse pitcher said. “That helped out a lot, but I still have to go out and execute.”
Morse hitters were at it once again in the fifth, leading off the inning with three straight hits off Waterman. A Kulis double and another Parks single set up a two-run base hit by Carpenter, the ‘Builder’s eighth, knocking Waterman out of the game.
“She throws a drop ball. We have a couple of girls that can throw it, so for five days straight, that’s all we worked on,” Laffely said. “What we were trying to do was look for the bottom of the ball and maybe hit the middle of the ball. As the game went on, we started to get our timing down.”
“She’s a workhorse out there and does anything asked of her,” Collins said of her junior pitcher. “She did her part, giving 110 percent. She could have worked the whole game, but I wanted to give them a different look.”
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