KISSIMMEE, Fla. (3/12/13) – Sophomore Courtney Yard earned the victory in the circle and drove in the game-winning run of the Kean University softball team's 8-7 extra-inning triumph against Lakeland College. She finished the day 5-7 at the plate to help lead the Cougars to a 10-5 come-from-behind victory over St. Norbert College in Tuesday's second game.
In the first matchup against Lakeland, Kelly Moorehead drove in Katie Schuh for the first run of the day and the Cougars added three more runs in the second thanks to hits by Alexa Cavasco, Megan Cegielski and Sandra Binkiewicz to take a 4-0 lead.
Yard was cruising with a shutout and the Cougars added one in the fourth and two in the fifth to go up 7-0. Everything was going swimmingly until Lakeland strung together five of the six hits they would muster all game and hung seven runs on the board to tie it in the last half of the sixth. The teams traded scoreless frames before beginning extras with a runner placed on second.
After a sacrifice by Moorehead, Yard erased all memory of the inconvenient sixth inning with a single that gave Kean the lead. She then got Lakeland to go 1-2-3 in bottom half of the inning to seal the victory.
Kean fell behind early against St. Norbert when Morgan Buboltz knocked a three-run homer in the first. The Cougars battled back to tie it on Kelsey Hannan's clutch two-out, 2-RBI single in the second, but slipped behind again as SNU added one run in both the third and the fourth.
The pace of the game changed in a hurry during the fifth inning. All nine players in the Kean lineup had a basehit in the frame, and St. Norbert used three different pitchers to try to stop the rally. Hannan (pictured left) started things up and Jess Fanty drove in two runs with a two-out single to cap the seven-run outburst. Perhaps shell-shocked, neither team scored again and Kean held on for its first sweep of the season.
The Cougars will wrap up their Southern swing with two games on Thursday against Roger Williams University and Marietta College.
