Games that end in walk-off fashion bring exhilaration to one team and devastation to the other.
Even though the Athletes Unlimited Softball League season hasn’t gone to plan for the Texas Volts, they were able to feel that exhilaration for a second day in a row Saturday following their 4-3 walk-off victory over the Carolina Blaze at Dell Diamond in Round Rock.
Jackie Lis’ single to the gap in right-center drove in Rylie Boone with the winning run in the bottom of the seventh inning. One night earlier, the Volts scored a 1-0 walk-off win over the Blaze in the bottom of the eighth inning. Saturday’s win came after the Blaze had taken a 3-0 lead in the second inning on a three-run homer by Reese Atwood off Volts starting pitcher Ally Carda.
The victory was only the fifth against 15 losses for the Volts, but Boone said it revealed a lot about the team’s character.
“It’s huge,”. Boone said. “I think just not being able to give up, we could have thrown in the towel a long time ago. If something happens, just pick them up, figure it out. It’s hard, it’s tough, so I think it takes a lot of grit and a lot of will to win to wake up every day and still punch back.”
The Volts chipped back against Blaze starting pitcher Karlyn Pickens with a run in the fifth inning. They tied the game in the sixth on a two-run double by pinch hitter Rachel Garcia against Keilani Ricketts, who relieved Pickens with one out and two runners on.
Boone singled to lead off the bottom of the seventh, and she went to second on a sacrifice bunt by Danieca Coffey. After Aliyah Binford struck out, the Blaze decided to walk Dejah Mulipola intentionally to get to Lis.
“I talked with the coaches before I went up there because I had a feeling they were going to put Dejah on,” Lis said. “I was just like I’m toeing up, and I’m going to drive the ball that way, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. That’s my plan. I’m going to stick with [it]. And when I was just seeing those outside pitches, I was just under a few of them, and then on that last pitch, I was really just trying to get a little bit more on top than the balls I fouled off. Sure enough did it, and there it went.”
Carda didn’t get the win for the Volts, but she hung in there after the Atwood homer to pitch six innings of four-hit, three-run ball. All of the runs against her were unearned, as the Volts made two errors behind her in the second.
“I walked down there after the sixth inning when we pulled her out, and I said, ‘Hey, being able to keep us in that ballgame,’ after kind of that fiasco of the (second) inning that wasn’t all her fault by any means,” said Volts coach Ricci Woodard. “And she just said, ‘Thank you, I appreciate it because it wasn’t easy.’ I think going back out there, she’s a competitor; she’s going to compete her tail end off for us, and that’s why we just left her out there and said, ‘Keep us in the ball game, and we’re going to keep fighting.’”
For the Blaze (8-11), it was their fifth consecutive loss. Four of those five losses have come by walk-off. Pickens struck out eight Volts in her 5.1 innings of work.
“It’s nothing you can control,” said Blaze coach Kara Dill. “Every loss that we have hurts. When you’re in the game, you never know when the game-winning play is going to happen. It’s the same thing as the season goes. We could look at this loss or a loss we had yesterday or a loss we had last week or early in the season … all of those stack up. It’s not one that’s weighted heavier than another. But moving forward, just continuing to have quality at-bats, I thought overall we had better-quality at-bats today. That’s moving in the right direction. Our pitching staff is strong. Our defense is strong. The table’s going to turn for us.”
Bruce Miles has covered sports in the Chicago area for 47 years, including baseball, hockey, football and Athletes Unlimited Softball League. He covered the Chicago Cubs in their historic run to the World Series title in 2016. He has written stories for Athletes Unlimited since 2020.
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