BY NATE KOTISSO | STAFF WRITER
McALLEN — All district games should be treated equally, but matchups between McAllen schools carry a little more weight.
Many of the McAllen Rowe and McAllen Memorial players often shared the diamond with each other growing up. What comes with familiarity is the knowledge that a one-sided score early in the game may not reflect the final outcome.
Rowe jumped to a seven-run lead through the first two and a half innings, but Memorial slowly chipped away at the deficit in the last several innings. The Mustangs did not overcome the Warriors’ head start and lost 11-8 at home Tuesday night.
“We batted around in the first inning,” McAllen Rowe coach Ozzy Hernandez said. “We hit the ball around up and down the lineup. There weren’t any cheap ones. We took it from there.”
The Mustangs (10-13, 4-2) faced their largest hill to climb going into the bottom of the fifth inning down nine runs. After scoring a run in the fifth, Memorial took advantage of a few Rowe errors and batted around in the sixth. Five runs had already crossed the plate before an out was recorded, and the Mustangs had two opportunities to bring the tying run to the plate in the sixth.
With runners at first and second, Memorial shortstop Alejandra Landa lined into a 5-3 double play, but the Mustangs still had a shot at causing havoc later in the frame. Third baseman Sasha Uribe drew a walk, which again brought the tying run in the form of right fielder Faith Escamilla, but Escamilla dribbled one to third to end the inning.
“With the caliber of athletes that we have, we always tell them that we can’t let one half inning or one full inning determine the outcome of the game,” McAllen Memorial coach Audra Benavidez said. “We’ve played a lot of four to five inning preseason games, so we took it as that. We set goals for each inning, which helped them see that they could come back. We just fell short today.”
McAllen Rowe second baseman Anahi De Ochoa carried a big stick in Tuesday’s game. De Ochoa drove in a run with a single in the second inning, but she was far from done. She came to the plate with the bases loaded in the fifth and drove an 0-2 pitch from Memorial starter Kayla Dow over the left-field fence for a grand slam. The home run was De Ochoa’s third of the season and wound up as the difference in the Rowe (13-9-1, 4-2) victory.
“I just had to swing steadily, because I’ve dropped my hands before,” De Ochoa said. “As long as I kept my head down and swung steadily, I knew I’d be fine.”
Rowe’s win and McAllen High’s 15-10 victory over Mission High created a three-way for second place in District 30-6A. The three-way tie is comprised of all three McAllen schools.
“There were a lot of things that I could have told the girls about facing Kayla, but they already know her like they (Memorial) knows our kids,” Hernandez said. “She’s a good athlete, but we were able to come out on top.”