Lakeland softball defeats Rhinelander 21-0

For the second straight game, things were pretty much over for the Rhinelander High School softball team on Tuesday not long after they began. 

Lakeland scored a whopping 16 times in the first inning and cruised to a 21-0 victory over the Hodags in three innings on Andrea Musson Field at the Haug Family Softball Complex.

Lakeland certainly had plenty of offensive firepower. Sarah Barton homered twice, including a grand slam in the first inning as part of a 9-RBI day, but the Hodags aided and abetted the T-Birds in the first inning. Rhinelander committed six errors in the inning and issued a combination of eight walks/hit batters as Lakeland sent 22 batters to the plate.

“Between walked batters, hit batters and mental errors — there were not many physical errors in the game — we gave them 16 to 17 of our 21 runs. We’re not going to win a game doing things like that,” Hodag co-coach Ali Bender said. “These are things we need to be thinking about. We’ve talked in practice about slowing the game down in your head, things you can do before the ball comes to you. You’re thinking of every single situation before the pitcher pitches the ball — who’s on base, where am I going with the ball. If the ball gets hit here, where am I covering? These are things that we are doing in practice and, coming into a game, are unable to do.”

The first 11 batters searched safely for Lakeland, which included back-to-back two-run doubles by Marlee Strasburg and Barton the first time through the order. Sophomore Libbey Buchmann faced 10 batters without retiring any of them as she gave up nine runs, five earned, on four hits with a pair of walks. 

Kelsey Winter was able to induce the first out for Lakeland, a Saylor Timmerman ground ball that resulted in a force out at home, but Karlin Williams followed with a two-run single to right and Barton followed two batters later with a towering shot over the centerfield fence, aided by a easterly wind that gusted near 40 MPH at times. 

Lakeland scored twice more in the inning before it finally came to an end on a Williams pop up in her third at-bat of the frame. 

The 16-run first inning came on the heels of a 10-run first given up by the Hodags at Mosinee last Thursday. While Mosinee and Lakeland figure to be two of the top contenders in the GNC this year, Bender said the Hodags had a chance to significantly limit the damage by making the routine plays.

“The last two games that we’ve had have started with a really, really rough inning,” she said. “Then we come back and, OK, we play with them. We get 3 up, 3 down. I think we just need to cut out that first inning (slow start), and makes some of those fine-tuned plays.”

All the run support was more than enough for Lakeland ace Saylor Timmerman. The University of Arkansas recruit struck out six, walked two and allowed just one hit over three innings. That hit was a two-out single by freshman Chase Verbist in the third inning. 

“We started hitting Saylor. We started getting on base. We started making sure we were having the right pitches to hit,” co-coach Sadie Adamski said. “We started getting the momentum but, to what Ali said, we keep starting these games and not doing what we usually do.”

Rhinelander held Lakeland scoreless in the second inning, but the T-Birds tacked on five more in the third. Ali Timmerman had an RBI groundout and Williams hit an RBI single to left before Barton delivered the final blow — a three-run shot to center. 

Winter gave up eight runs on three hits over two stints in the circle for Rhinelander. Laney Haenel pitched two innings, allowing four runs on three hits. 

It was not scheduled to get any easier for the Hodags Thursday, with defending GNC-champion Medford slated to come to town in a game that concluded after press time for today’s edition. Rhinelander will be back in action this Tuesday at Tomahawk.

Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].