Victorious La Cueva is 6A’s lone unbeaten
Bears, Cleveland advance to final
The number of undefeated softball teams in Class 6A dropped from three to one on Friday.
That one, La Cueva, the top seed for the Albuquerque Metro Championships, advanced to today’s 1:30 p.m. title game at Lobo Field.
The Bears (8-0) will face No. 2 seed Cleveland (5-6), which won in walk-off fashion for the second straight day.
In Friday’s semifinals, La Cueva edged visiting Sandia, while the Storm rallied past Volcano Vista in eight innings. No. 1 LA CUEVA 1, No.
4 SANDIA 0: OK, so Jessica McAlister didn’t hit another home run. She almost did. But the whitehot McAlister — the Bears’ catcher who belted two home runs in each of La Cueva’s first two Metro victories this week — still delivered the game-winning RBI against the District 2-6A rival Matadors. It was a sharp double to right-center that scored Andrea Howard in the fourth inning.
“Pretty big,” McAlister said with a smile, asked how large the softball was looking to her this week. “I feel pretty confident.”
Howard led off the bottom of the fourth against Victoria Reyes with a bunt single. Shannon Stein walked on four pitches, and Howard caught the Sandia defense napping, by moving all the way to third on the Stein walk. Then came McAlister. “I just needed to get the ball hard in play,” she said.
Stein also tried to score from first base, but the Matadors mowed her down at the plate. It didn’t matter, in the end.
“There’s nobody in the lineup seeing it better than (Jessica) right now,” La Cueva coach Ron Romero said.
Senior pitcher Kendra Keahbone went the distance for the Bears in just her second start of the season. She missed a chunk of the season with an illness. Romero knew all week that the ball would go to Keahbone on Friday.
“They’re a tough team, and I knew this was gonna be a really close game,” Keahbone said of Sandia.
It was the first loss of the season for Sandia (7-1).
La Cueva had won its first seven games by a combined score of 97-8. Friday was the Bears’ first serious test of the season.
“I voted Sandia the No. 2 seed (for Metros), so we
knew what we were in for,” Romero said. “We knew this was gonna be the game.”
No. 2 CLEVELAND 6, No. 3 VOLCANO VISTA 5
(8): At Cleveland, Celeste Galindo’s one-out triple down the right-field line scored Aliehs Ortiz with the winning run as the Storm again won in dramatic fashion.
Cleveland — which suffered three of its losses last week to California schools in a tournament in Arizona — walked off Eldorado on Thursday, 12-11 in the quarterfinals.
In the eighth inning of a 4-4 game Friday, the Hawks (7-1) scored the go-ahead run on a sacrifice fly by Samantha Trujillo.
In the bottom half, Audrianna Gutierrez started the inning standing on second base for Cleveland. Hailey Tauscher sacrificed her to third before Ortiz singled up the middle to score Gutierrez and tie the game 5-5.
Volcano Vista will face Sandia for third place today.