Belgrade players exchange high-fives during an intrasquad scrimmage on March 23. The Panthers began the season Tuesday with a non-conference game at Missoula Sentinel.
Belgrade players exchange high-fives during an intrasquad scrimmage on March 23. The Panthers began the season Tuesday with a non-conference game at Missoula Sentinel.
Dan Chesnet
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In a game that featured three home runs and 29 total hits, Belgrade and Missoula Sentinel began the season with a bang on Tuesday.
The contest was originally scheduled to be played in Belgrade, but moved to Missoula due poor field conditions following recent snowfall in the Gallatin Valley. The Panthers led 6-2 going into the bottom of the third, then Sentinel scored 13 runs over the next two innings en route to a 20-10 non-conference victory.
“I thought our girls hit the ball well and I thought (Olivia) Mills and Ella (Seaman) did a great job in the circle. Sentinel’s a great hitting team and I thought we hit pretty well with them,” Belgrade head coach Joey Roberts said. “We just didn’t execute the little things and when you don’t execute the little things they snowball into big things, and unfortunately, we had two bad innings where that was really magnified.”
The Panthers took a 3-0 in the first, but Sentinel countered in the bottom half of the frame when Kennedy Dypwick hit a 2-run homer. While Mills belted a 2-run home run in the second to make it 5-2, the junior allowed 11 hits and seven earned runs before Seaman took over in the circle in the fifth.
Belgrade junior Olivia Mills delivers a pitch March 23 during an intrasquad scrimmage at the Belgrade Softball Complex.
Dan Chesnet
The Panthers committed five errors with most of those miscues coming in the third and fourth innings. Sentinel finished with 17 hits, including a 2-run homer by Nina Sammoury in the sixth.
Belgrade tallied 12 hits in the contest with Mills adding a double en route to finishing 3 for 3 with a pair of RBIs. Brooklyn Ragland and Ava Lund also had a double, and Bailee White was 2 for 2 as a pinch hitter.
“Our girls hit the ball well today,” said Roberts. “We still need to execute at a higher level as far as bunting and how that kind of thing goes. But I thought we ran the bases well.”
Belgrade returns to action Friday at Helena High and hosts Helena Capital on Saturday. Then the Panthers continue a tough non-conference slate Tuesday with a doubleheader at Butte High.
“A lot of softball this week. We learned a lot today,” said Roberts. “I thought our whole program, from top to bottom, we learned a lot about ourselves and what we need to do and there’s a lot of good things and a lot we need to work on. This week’s going to be good for that because there’s a lot of games to hopefully start applying that stuff.”
Boxscores
Missoula Sentinel 20, Belgrade 10
Belgrade 321 121 - 10 12 5
Sentinel 207 623 - 20 17 1
Olivia Mills, Ella Seaman (5) and Ava Lund. Alyssa Hanninen, Piper Whitman (5) and Nina Sammoury.
