By Coach Heather Struve
Keira Jungers, the pitcher for #8 ranked Newell-Fonda, brought the heat on Wednesday, June 10 by striking out 14 South O’Brien batters as the Mustangs won the Class 1A Region 1 quarterfinal matchup 9-0 at Fonda. She throws extremely hard and has a nasty riseball. And if that was not enough, the umpire had a very high strike zone, which we had not seen all year. We had a very hard time catching up with her pitch. Brooklyn Edwards had the lone hit off of a change up in the fifth inning and was our only baserunner for the night.
Edwards really threw a nice game for South O’Brien, but one terrible inning on defense inflated N-F’s score. In the third inning it seemed we could not make a routine play if our life depended on it. The Mustangs had four hits, along with the Wolverines committing three errors and not making a couple other plays that did not count as errors, but could have been easy outs. N-F put seven of their nine runs on the board in that miserable third inning. Other than that, they scored once in the second and once in the fourth. Edwards ended her high school career with a nice performance against a very good Newell-Fonda team. She gave up seven hits, but four of them were to one player. She allowed nine runs, but only five were earned. She struck out one, walked three and intentionally walked one.

The highlight for the defense came in the fifth inning. N-F was leading 9-0 and had baserunners at second and third with one out, so we elected to intentionally walk the next batter to load the bases. The runner on third could not score or N-F would win by the mercy rule, so we moved our outfielders in more shallow in order to make the play at home. The next batter hit a pop fly to Addison Hedberg in centerfield and she made the catch and threw it home to get the tagout to prolong the game. After the big third inning we made a goal to make it the whole seven innings and we accomplished that.
The South O’Brien girls ended their season with an 11-13 overall record and a 5-5 War Eagle Conference mark, which put them in a tie for fifth place. We were a very young team as far as age and also experience. We only returned three full-time starters from the previous season, so to end with a better record than last year was a big accomplishment. Plus, we had six games on our schedule cancelled and some of them would have been very winnable. Our defense and pitching kept us competitive with just about any team on any given night. Our hitting cost us a few games, but we will work on that in the offseason and hopefully get better for next year.
Four girls earned War Eagle All-Conference honors. Brooklyn Edwards and Jinger Nieuwenhuis made 1st Team, Abby Nelson was on 2nd Team and Reese Farquhar got Honorable Mention. The three seniors, Brooklyn Edwards, Jinger Nieuwenhuis and Marissa Ebel will leave some holes to fill and they will surely be missed.
SO’
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 – 0
N-F
0 1 7 1 0 0 x – 9