Katy advances past Atascocita

Atascocita pitcher Emery Stanush slowed Katy after it pounded Tierrah Williams a day earlier, so Stanush started Game 2 on Friday. The Tigers still went to work early.

Cait Calland’s two-run homer secured a four-run lead before Williams took over in the third inning, sparking a 5-2 victory and a two-game sweep of their Class 6A Region III semifinal softball series at Atascocita.

“Atascocita has a really good softball team, and we were planning from day one that this probably was going to be a threegame series because we have that much respect for them,” Katy coach Kalum Haack said. “But our defense played really well this weekend, our pitching kept us in the ballgame … and we had some clutch hitting.”

The No. 1-ranked Tigers (34-3) play Deer Park or Cypress Ranch next week in their third regional final in three years. Atascocita, Region II champion last year, finished 27-4.

Williams allowed seven runs on 10 hits through the first three innings of Katy’s 8-2 win Thursday in Game 1. Stanush surrendered one run on three hits in the last three.

They reversed roles Friday — but the result was the same. Stanush gave up four runs on six hits in 22⁄3 innings, then Williams allowed one unearned run the rest of the way.

“That’s a great hitting team,” Atascocita coach Ashley Boyd said. “We could have put anybody out there, and they were eventually going to find ways to score runs.”

Three straight singles led to Alyssa LeBlanc’s runscoring hit and 1-0 lead in the first inning.

Chloe Cobb, who started for the Tigers, supported her winning performance with a run-scoring double in the third, followed by Calland’s towering two-run blast to center field for a 4-0 advantage.

“It was an outside pitch,” Calland said. “After my first at-bat (a strikeout), I had to make an adjustment, and it felt great to do that.”

Katy finished with nine hits, with LeBlanc going 2-for-4.

She earned the win in Game 1 but didn’t have to throw Friday, giving her valuable rest for the regional final.

Cobb allowed two runs on seven hits in 41⁄3 innings of work.

“She did a really good job of keeping them off-balance and getting some easy ground balls, some easy foul balls, because that’s what she does,” Haack said. “She’s not going to go in there and strike a lot of them out. “She did her job.” The Eagles also had nine hits but stranded 12 runners, leaving the bases loaded in the first.

They also committed four errors.

Atascocita’s Skylar Willabay went 2-for-2 with two hit-by-pitches.

“We were doing a good job of getting people on,” Boyd said. “We were doing a terrible job of moving runners with less than two outs, and it came back to bite us.”