Oak Forest wraps up perfect SSC season

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Oak Forest put an exclamation mark on a perfect South Suburban Conference season by defeating Bremen 9-0 in front of a Seniors Day crowd Thursday.

Senior Molly Singraber? She put an exclamation mark on her postgame reaction.

“Whoo, hoo!” she said happily.

Knew it all the time, huh.

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely. All the way.”

But seriously ...

“We just kept our focus,” Singraber said. “We’re always as a team, and when we come out as a team we do really well like we did today.”

You want team? Here it is.

Singraber drove in a pair of runs with two hits. Amanda Sheppard socked a solo home run and added another RBI. Emily Naegele stroked two doubles, good for two runs. Haylee Swanson had two hits, an RBI, reached base all three times and scored three times. Amy Zalud was 2-for-3.

That was just the hitting.

Emily Norton went five scoreless innings in the circle for the Bengals, allowing two hits while striking out 12 in improving her record to 21-2.

Oak Forest (23-3, 16-0) finishes the regular season with nonconference games vs. Homewood-Flossmoor and Lincoln-Way East before entering the Class 3A state playoffs as the No. 1 seed in the Joliet Catholic Sectional. Bremen, which is the eighth seed in the JCA field, dropped to 11-15, 6-9.

Oak Forest won Thursday’s contest relatively easily, but it didn’t start out that way. For two innings the two teams battled to a scoreless tie, with Oak Forest going down 1-2-3 in each inning against Bremen pitcher Taryn Flores.

The Braves had the first good chance to score, loading the bases in the top of the third on singles by Alyssa Fitzgerald and Flores and a walk by Carissa Ramirez. With two outs, Kelly Cohn hit an infield chopper to short. With Norton directing traffic from the mound, Sheppard charged, made the play and tossed to first to get Cohn by a small margin.

“I actually told Emily after we got to the dugout that I heard her saying, ‘Shep, Shep, Shep! Here we go, Shep!’ ” Sheppard said. “That’s kind of what kept me going there. I just made the play. That’s what you’ve got to do.”

Swanson opened the bottom of the third for Oak Forest with a single up the middle. She was on third with one out when Singraber attacked an 0-and-2 changeup and sent a rocket down the third-base line for an RBI double.

Singraber’s shot seemed to loosen up the rest of the Bengals, who pounced on Flores for three runs in each of the third, fourth and fifth. Among the highlights was a leadoff fifth-inning bomb over the fence in left field by Sheppard, her sixth home run of the season.

“Well, this one was on Senior Night so that was pretty nice,” Sheppard said.

Norton, meanwhile, was virtually untouchable after her third-inning scare. She retired the next five batters on strikes and got the sixth on a tapper to first base.

“I started off the game not so great,” Norton said. “I guess it wasn’t my ‘on’ time. But once I started feeling it more, I guess you can say I think the whole team felt it too and we all kept it going. And when I wasn’t on, they definitely backed me all the way.”