Mountaineers’ season comes to end against Toledo

The Rainier softball team lost its final two games of the season against Adna and Toledo on Thursday, May 15, at Fort Borst Park in Centralia. A win in either game would’ve secured their spot in the 2B state tournament.

How close they came, considering their season nearly ended the day before.
The Mountaineers knew they’d be in for a tough one against Pe Ell-Willapa Valley on Wednesday, March 14, especially with Keira Anderson, their star catcher, temporarily unavailable because of school testing.

Rainier head coach Katie Qualls did her best to shuffle her defense, moving left fielder Victoria Garcia to second and Lucy Wolfe to third, while eighth-grader Mia Naval filled in at catcher.

“We had to move everybody around,” Qualls said. “So, we’d done something that we’d never done before and put a lot of pressure on a couple kids that we’d never put pressure on like that.”

The Pacific 2B champions added to the pressure, scoring six runs against the Mountaineers through the first two innings.

“(Anderson) is the glue of our team, she’s our senior,” Ryleigh Cruse said after the game, noting the impact of Anderson’s absence.

Anderson’s return in the third inning restored some order, but didn’t stop the runs. The Titans ended the 2B District 4 quarterfinal game in the fifth with a 13-0 run-rule shutout.

Only Gracie Lantz and Elaina Henry notched hits for Rainier.

The Mountaineers weren’t surprised by the outcome. Instead, they went into the game with the goal to “treat it as reps,” according to Coach Qualls.

“We had talked about that prior to the beginning of the (Pe Ell-Willapa Valley) game, that no matter what, that we can’t get down on it,” Qualls said.

After all, the Mountaineers had two chances to advance to the next round of the tournament, after winning their opening district matchup against Mossyrock on May 12. But their loss to Pe Ell-Willapa Valley put them into a loser-out matchup against Forks later that afternoon.

Unfazed by the loss, the Mountaineers built an 8-3 lead against the Spartans heading into the bottom of the sixth. That’s when their youth and inexperience showed itself again on defense.

After a shallow infield pop-up by Forks’s Brooklynn Rondeau, Avery Dilley followed with a hard hit to right field that rolled by Ayana Elmstead, sending Rondeau home. Dilley scored two outs later after Kat Clark slipped a soft grounder by second baseman Lucy Wolfe.

The Mountaineers made it more interesting in the seventh when Bailey Johnson’s shallow pop fly landed fair just over first baseman Gracie Lantz’s head. Then, after a groundout, Rondeau ripped a two-run shot over the center field wall to make it a one-score game.

In the next at-bat, Dilley went opposite to right field again, reaching on a triple.
With two outs and the tying run on third, Kendyl Woody connected with Elaina Henry’s pitch, sending a grounder toward right field. This time, Lantz attacked and gathered the ball, before turning and beating Woody to first base.

The Mountaineers won by a final of 8-7.

“Got to make it interesting, right?” Qualls said with a relieved smile after the game.

Qualls commended her team’s energy after coming off a big loss just hours earlier.

“They were hyped for this game and they deserved it,” Qualls said. “And Forks did, too. So, you know, good on them. They always stayed up. That’s one thing they’ve done, especially towards the later end of the postseason, is they stayed together.”

“We just knew we had to stay up, because if we lost, we were done,” Cruse said after the game.

Cruse finished the game batting 4-for-4 with 2 RBIs.

“I wasn’t seeing (the ball well) at first, so I’m glad that I kind of picked it up,” Cruse said. “I just knew that the team needed me. I was hitting in the three spot.”

“This right here is just a testament that they want to keep playing. No matter who the next opponent is… they don’t care, Qualls said. “They want to keep playing, keep moving forward.”

The win against Forks put the Mountaineers back into another double-elimination scenario, with two chances to qualify for the 2B state tournament.
They lost their first matchup to Adna 13-2 in five innings on Thursday, May 15, at Fort Borst Park. Then, in a winner-goes-to-state matchup against Toledo later that afternoon, the Mountaineers were run-ruled again.

Rainier finishes the season with a final record of 13-9 after district play, just one win away from state.

If you’re judging the Rainier High School softball team on results alone, look no further than their 15-3 run-rule loss to the Toledo Riverhawks, a team that finished just one spot above the Mountaineers in the Central 2B League standings.

But for a squad with just two graduating seniors, and only one junior in Layla Hill, the gap between Rainier and the top of the C2BL may be closing.

Qualls knows that consistency is key for teams to make a deep postseason run. She said she sometimes had to remind herself how young her squad is, considering how much they improved week to week.

“When they have those hits or they come through like Lucy’s (winning catch against) Mossyrock… it’s almost like, all of a sudden, it turns and they do something like that,” Qualls said.

That’s when she had to “dial it back” and “remember the inexperience.”

“But it’s the consistency that needs to be present and it’s not, and that’s where teams get hurt,” Qualls said.

The Mountaineers’ lack of consistency hasn’t stopped Qualls and the rest of the team from appreciating their success.

“It’s amazing how far we have come mentally and physically,” Cruse said after the Forks game. “We had, I believe, three or four girls that have never played before that are starting. So it is amazing, and we also have an eighth grader (Mia Naval) playing a main spot in our field that is amazing, so I’m glad that we’ve actually come together. We’re a really good team mentally. It’s just the physically is where we need to come together.”