Terrier sophomore center fielder Mandy Fernandez hit a two-run home run to put the Terriers ahead of Boston College 3-0 in the fourth inning of a winning effort.
Following a tough 11-8 loss to the University of Connecticut Wednesday afternoon, the Boston University softball team took the field once again Thursday afternoon to start off a busy weekend during which it defeated Boston College and lost two of three against Hartford University.
The first game of the weekend was against BU’s (11-19-1, 2-4 America East) neighbor to the west, BC (9-21).
BU took the momentum from its great defense in the top of the first and used it to get up on BC early on. With two runners on base and no outs, senior Emily Roesch singled to left field to get Boston University on the board first.
However, the rest of the inning did not continue in this fashion, as the remaining BU hitters spoiled multiple scoring chances, only coming out of the inning with one run.
With senior pitcher Whitney Tuthill throwing a shutout, BU exploded in the fourth inning to provide a bit of a cushion for its starter. A two-run home run by sophomore center fielder Mandy Fernandez gave the Terriers a commanding 3-0 lead in the fourth inning.
Despite surrendering one run in the seventh inning to Boston College’s C.J. Chirichigno, BU held onto the lead and beat its rival.
“It was exciting,” said BU coach Kathryn Gleason. “We emphasized that it was another game and no game is more important, but it was something special. It was a battle.”
After the win at home and a day off on Friday, BU traveled down to West Hartford, Conn., to take on the University of Hartford (12-21, 4-5 America East) in a three-game series.
In the first of two games Saturday afternoon, Tuthill returned to the mound for the Terriers. The matchup against Hartford was a pitchers’ duel as batters could not find an answer to Tuthill or the Hawks’ Zuzana Kudernatschova for the first several innings.
It was not until the fifth inning that the Terriers were able to get to Kudernatschova, as a single by freshman designated hitter Lauren Hynes, a double by Fernandez and RBI single by junior center fielder Jayme Mask got BU on the board 1-0. During the bottom half of the same inning, the Hawks were able to tie it up at one apiece on an RBI bunt by sophomore Margaret Betz.
After the fifth inning, though, it was all Terriers. In the top of the sixth, BU continued to get good cuts at the plate, piling up several singles to score two runs and take a 3-1 lead. This time around, Hartford did not have a response and remained scoreless for the rest of the game, while BU added on another run to seal win 4-1.
In the second game, with Tuthill back on the mound for BU and junior Kaitlyn Meade for Hartford, things took a turn in the opposite direction for the Terriers.
Similar to their two previous games, the Terriers took a 1-0 lead in the top of the second inning. Just as they did in the earlier game, Hartford had a response, scoring two runs to take a 2-1 lead.
With the momentum shift in favor of Hartford, the hot bats of the Hawks continued to swing as they tacked on another three runs in the bottom of the third.
In the fifth inning, the Terriers’ bats came alive once again, and they were able to cut down the Hartford lead to one before Meade shut them down. Meade continued to send BU hitters back to the dugout frustrated for the rest of the game en route to the 5-4 win and a split of Saturday’s contests.
Sunday was another tough day for the Terriers as they played in a rubber match against the Hawks. With Tuthill on the mound once again for BU, the Terriers were looking to leave Hartford with a big win.
Tuthill surrendered two runs in the first inning to the Hawks after a scoreless top half for the Terriers. Hartford kept BU scoreless through four and built a 3-0 lead, but once again, the Terriers got to Hartford pitcher Kudernatschova and tied the game in the top of the fifth.
The game remained tied at three until the bottom of the seventh, when some late-game heroics by Hartford sophomore Kate Wacyk, who hit a walk-off two-run home run to put the Hawks up 5-3, sending the Terriers packing.
“We’re obviously disappointed,” Gleason said. “We felt we were matched up well with Hartford, but we left several people on base and that’s disappointing. We gave ourselves a chance, their pitcher did a good job, and we just weren’t patient and didn’t let the ball come to us.”
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
