Nazareth knocks off Riverside-Brookfield

Updated: June 1, 2011 8:22PM

Plenty of things were stacked against the Nazareth softball team heading into Wednesday’s Class 3A sectional semifinal at Wheaton St. Francis.

The Roadrunners (19-16) were facing a top-seeded Riverside-Brookfield squad and a team that had ended its season last year and had beaten them again earlier this spring. On top of that, Nazareth’s program has never won a sectional game before and had to face the Bulldogs’ Rachel Denneny, who took the mound with an 11-2 record.

But Nazareth countered with a fast start – a four-run first inning that knocked Denneny out before she recorded an out – then rode the powerful bat of shortstop Shannon Cawley to a pair of key insurance runs in a 6-3 victory to advance to Saturday’s sectional title game.

Cawley, the runner-up to Player of the Year in the East Suburban Catholic Conference, led off the top of the first inning with a single for the fourth-seeded Roadrunners. An error, a walk and three straight singles from Cat Usher, Holly Haberkorn and Sara Maslar-Donar made the score 4-0 and the Bulldogs (24-8) never quite recovered.

“We didn’t look back after that,” Cawley said of the first-inning outburst. “We wanted to come out strong, get a lead and then let Cat (Usher) do her thing on the mound.”

Riverside-Brookfield, which has won four straight regional crowns, fought back with one run in the second and two more in the third to close to within 4-3.

But the first of Cawley’s two home runs (she now has a school-record 13 on the season) made it 5-3 in the fourth and then in the bottom of the fifth R-B was hurt by an umpire’s call that Tierney Duffy had left first base early on a pitch which would have resulted in a single by Kiley Rusen (2-for-3, RBI). Instead of first and second with none out, Duffy was called out and Rusen was sent back to the plate.

“The first inning killed us and then that call really hurt. It deflated us,” first-year Bulldogs coach John Vermillion said.

But Cawley also was not done hurting the softball and her opponent. She smacked her second dinger of the game to right-center in the seventh to make the score 6-3, and Usher worked a 1-2-3 bottom of the seventh to seal the win and complete her five-hit victory.

“We came out with a great focus,” Nazareth coach Kristen Stojetz said. “Our goal being the visiting team was to put pressure on them right away and we came out and did that in the first.’

The Roadrunners will now play in their first-ever sectional final Saturday at 11 a.m. against either No. 2 Glenbard South or host and No. 3 St. Francis.

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