By JOSHUA McKINNEY, Staff Writer
It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish and Port Isabel ended Tuesday night’s district game on top.
The Port Isabel Lady Tarpons beat the Raymondville Lady Bearkats 6-5 at Port Isabel.
The Lady Tarpons needed a seventh-inning rally to get past Raymondville for a big win in District 32-4A play.
Port Isabel coach Danno Wise thinks his team is finding its stride at the right time, during a furious playoff hunt.
“For us, this a little more of the spirit that I expected from this team all year long,” he said. “It’s taken us a little while to find our personality and find who we are, but tonight I thought the girls did a good job chipping away, not putting their head down and keeping at it.”
Port Isabel’s Marina Wise came to the plate with her team trailing 5-4 and hit a fly-ball to right field that was dropped, scoring Alex Martinez and Guillian Garza for the walk-off win.
Carolina Guevara started Port Isabel’s surge by hitting the ball through the shortstop’s legs and into left field to get on base. Two batters later, Martinez drew a walk to give Port Isabel (9-9, 5-4) runners on first and second with one out.
Garza followed Martinez’s walk with a single that drove in Guevara, and Wise’s outfield shot ended a game that Port Isabel almost let slip away after a promising start.
“We really needed this win,” Marina Wise said. “We went through a little bit of a slump. I feel like we had been losing quite a bit of tough games like this, but instead of coming out on top like we did today, we came out on bottom. It was really great to break that little funk we were in.”
Martinez went 2-for-3 hitting with a walk and two runs. Garza scored two runs, and Natasha Ramirez had two hits and an RBI.
Anabel Hernandez and Rachel Muniz had three hits each for Raymondville.
The Lady Tarpons started the game strong by coming to the plate during the bottom of first inning down 1-0 and scoring three runs thanks to a two-run double by Wise and an RBI single from Ramirez.
Raymondville answered with two runs in the top of the second to tie the game at 3.
The Lady Tarpons’ bats went mostly silent until the seventh inning, and Raymondville took the lead with a two-run shot from Stephany Rodriguez during the fifth inning to go up 5-3.
Port Isabel had the game-tying run at the plate during the bottom of the fifth and the go-ahead run in the batter’s box during the bottom of the sixth but didn’t get runs across.
But the big inning from Port Isabel left Raymondville empty handed.
“It was a battle of who wanted it at the very end,” Raymondville coach Pete Soria said. “That’s what I spoke to Coach (Wise) about. It looked like his girls in the seventh inning wanted it a little more. They came out to play. They did well today.”
Joshua McKinney covers high school sports for The Brownsville Herald. You can reach him at (956) 982-6663 or via email at [email protected]. On Twitter, he’s @joshuabvherald.