DIVISION III SOFTBALL CHAMPIONSHIPS : Laguna Hills Fends Off Pressure, Irvine

One team applied pressure, the other succumbed to it.

By the time it was over, in a sport where one run is the norm, Laguna Hills defeated second-seeded Irvine, 5-4, to claim the Southern Section Division III softball championship Wednesday at Mayfair Park.

It made for a nasty looking scorebook: There were nine runs, and only one, Irvine’s, was earned.

It wasn’t until the fourth inning that the game settled into normalcy. Irvine (26-6) went down in order in the top of the inning on eight pitches. Before the inning, the Hawks’ Windy Scofield had thrown 53 pitches.

By then, Laguna Hills (24-5) had a 5-3 lead.

There were 17 hits, of 10 of them by Irvine.

There were 16 runners left on base--eight by each team.

And there were eight errors--seven by Irvine, all in the first three innings.

“They made some mistakes, but the balls they threw away, those weren’t routine outs,” Laguna Hills Coach Cary Crouch said. “They’re having to barehand balls and throw in a hurry.

“We did what we like to do: we worked the ball to the spots on the field where it’s supposed to go, and when we do that, we’re going to cash the runs in.

“We put the pressure on them.”

And Irvine didn’t handle it. Throwing errors on the first three batters, a walk and Jennifer Arzola’s sacrifice fly to left field gave Laguna Hills a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the first inning.

Irvine answered with three runs in the top of the second, capped by run-scoring singles by Kim Fischer and Rebecca Smith. All the runs were unearned because of Laguna Hills’ lone error.

“The decisive point in the game was when they went ahead and we came back and went ahead,” said Crouch, who shared a Division 2-A title with Woodbridge in 1987. “That was the key, to show character after that miserable inning--to go sky-high, to go to the bottom, and then to pull it back up.”

Sumer McMahon reached base on a fielder’s choice. Alycia Stevens was safe on a bunt. Lesley Haynes singled to left, loading the bases. Misty Thompson drew a questionable scoring decision when her grounder went through the left side of the drawn-in infield, shortstop Monika Hollstein being called for an error. That scored one run, and Stevens scored when the ball got past left fielder Fischer.

Irvine prevented another run when Haynes was thrown out by center fielder Meaghan Woodruff while trying to score on Arzola’s single, ending the inning.

Laguna Hills added another run in the third. Christy Journell singled and took third when Amber Journell’s sacrifice bunt was thrown away by Alleah Poulson. She scored when second baseman Jill Sanford muffed a bouncer, but Journell would have scored had Sanford fielded the ball cleanly.

“It’s hard to play catch-up and we made it hard on ourselves,” said Irvine Coach Lisa Baker.