Crimson Suffers Disastrous Loss En Route to Weekend Split

After a weekend of mixed results, the Harvard softball team is hanging on in the Ivy race. The Crimson (15-16, 4-4) won its first contest against Brown on Saturday and its second game against Yale on Sunday, but was unable to complete the sweep in either twinbill, finishing .500 on the weekend.

Harvard will look to even things out on Thursday when it travels to Amherst to take on UMass before another weekend of Ivy competition against league-leader Princeton and Penn.

HARVARD 2, YALE 0

After a scoreless inning of relief in the first game of the afternoon, sophomore Amanda Watkins went the distance in the second, closing the door on the Bulldogs with a shutout at Yale’s Dewitt Family Field.

Watkins scattered three hits and struck out two in cruising to her second shutout of the season.

“Amanda has grown a lot in her game as a pitcher,” Allard said. “I think the biggest difference over the past week or so is that she’s really getting consistent. She’s really staying on her game and staying in a good zone consistently.”

Watkins has surrendered just one run in her last 19 innings, dating back to an April 10 shutout of Columbia.

After the teams held each other silent for the first few innings, senior Rachel Murray drove in what would prove to be the winning run in the sixth inning, clubbing a homer to put her team on top 1-0. Sophomore Danielle Kerper provided some insurance in the seventh with an RBI single.

YALE 7, HARVARD 4

Harvard kicked off its Sunday doubleheader with Yale on a promising note, scoring in the first on an RBI single by Murray.

The Bulldog lineup, however, proved to be too much for the Crimson pitching staff to handle, breaking through for a four-run third inning against sophomore starter Shelly Madick. Madick absorbed the loss, falling to 6-4 on the season. She allowed five hits and walked three while striking out two.

Junior Lauren Brown was 3-for-4 with a run scored, and freshman Bailey Vertovez scored a pair of runs.

BROWN 11, HARVARD 10

A Harvard victory was all but guaranteed until a wild seventh inning turned it into a heartbreakingly surreal loss.

It was all Crimson up until the game’s final frame. Harvard seized an early lead on junior Julia Kidder’s first-inning RBI single, and the scoring didn’t stop there. The Crimson racked up five runs in a fifth-inning outburst, and piled on two more in the seventh for good measure. Much of the scoring came from the bats of senior Pilar Adams, who contributed a 3-for-5, four-RBI game, and freshman Jade Reichling, who was 3-for-5 with a trio of RBIs

When the dust had settled, Harvard enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable 10-2 lead. With two outs in the game’s final inning and an eight-run cushion, the team watched as the lead slowly disappeared.

The Bears mounted an impossible nine-run surge, aided by a pair of errors, to wrestle the game away from a stunned Crimson team.

Most of the damage went on Vertovez’s record in her 1.2 innings of work, while senior Michele McAteer pitched to the fatal final batter.

A pair of opportunities to get the game called on the run rule slipped away from Harvard in the later innings.

Despite the difficult defeat, Allard is hopeful that her team learned some valuable lessons from the outing.

“First of all, we need to finish things,” Allard said. “We didn’t finish the game...We let the game lull, and we stopped. The last part of it was that we started to doubt ourselves in the bottom of the seventh. We had plenty of runs to work with, and we were plagued by a lot of doubt and we just could not finish it.”

HARVARD 6, BROWN 2

McAteer picked up the win in relief, her first of the season, and junior Sarah Shaughnessy and Vertovez provided a pair of RBI doubles to lead Harvard over Brown.

Brown took the lead in the second innning, scoring two runs off of starter Madick, but the Crimson eventually responded with two of its own in the fifth before putting the game out of reach with four runs in the sixth.

“We came out strong, we were hitting the ball well, we were making good adjustments, we were coming together nicely,” Allard said.

Adams tore through the Bears pitching staff once again, going 2-for-4 with a run scored, and senior Erin Halpenny added a pair of RBIs.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Rubin-Wills can be reached at drubin@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Brad Hinshelwood can be reached at bhinshel@fas.harvard.edu.