By Jeremy McDonald

jeremymcdonald73@gmail.com

SILVERTON, Ore.–  Corvallis’ Holland Jensen and Silverton’s McKenzee Petersen had themselves a good little defensive battle against one another in Saturday’s Mid-Willamette Conference midday game at Silverton High School.

Coming off a tough loss to Dallas Friday, Jensen started the game with a no-hitter through six innings that kept the Foxes at bay as the Spartans built themselves a solid 4-0 lead over Silverton in their 4-1 victory.  Silverton played sharper than they had in Friday’s 11-0 defeat to Lebanon as they cut down on errors and made Corvallis string things together as they did in their fifth game in six days this week.

“It felt really good because my speed was up, they were hitting a lot of ground balls but my defense was working well.  They made the play if they needed to,” Jensen starts.  “We made the plays that we needed to and that helped boost our confidence and we played together today.  (The bats) made us more excited to come out and field and be able to shut them down, that really felt good.  I think it’ll feed into our next games.  Like now we know that we can do it and we’re able to make these plays and we know we have each other’s backs.”

Despite playing well defensively Saturday, it took a while for Silverton to time out Jensen.  They got a few baserunners on, three to be exact, going into the seventh inning when everything finally clicked.  Fatigue from the volume of games sank in the past two games, but they fought through it as Morgan Stadeli singled that brought Arika Rodriguez home with two outs.  Stadeli joined Kate Kofstad on the basepaths as they brought the tying run to the plate.

But the Foxes couldn’t complete the comeback to tie things up to force extras as they fell in the close game and looking to rebound next week with Central on Monday.

“Today we learned a lot.  We improved a lot going from yesterday to today and we need to get our bats going a little bit more and that we fought hard,” Petersen said.  “I’m happy that they (the defense) have my back and they’re there to make the plays look easy, even though I know it’s not easy.  But they make it look good, I’m just proud of them all.”

Jensen finished the game with 12 strikeouts and was 2-for-4 hitting and Ava Preschel went 2-for-3 with 2RBI’s in the win for Corvallis.Petersen struck out six for Silverton and broke up Jensen’s no-hitter in the seventh inning with a single.  Breazen Henderson also collected a hit.

Photos By Jeremy McDonald