A flair for the dramatic seems to be the way Trinity is going about the 2015 season.
The Blazers continued those ways against Lincoln-Way East on Friday when they came up in the top of the seventh trailing 2-0 against Nikole Van Gennep, who was working on a three-hit, seven strikeout performance.
A pair of runs to tie in that seventh and two more in the ninth was enough for the Blazers to pull out a 4-2 come-from-behind win in New Lenox.
“We’ve done that three times this year,” said Trinity coach Bob Osborne, whose team was 0-5 against the Griffins and improved to 7-2. “We did it against York and Lincoln-Way North. For a young team with two seniors you can see they play very hard.”
Playing harder than she should have had to was Blazers shortstop Anyssa Iliopoulos, who was victimized by a pitcher-friendly strike zone every time at bat but kept her focus and managed a 3-for-4 day that included two doubles and two runs scored.
She doubled and scored in the seventh and singled and scored in the ninth.
“You just have to jump on the first pitch that’s close,” Iliopoulos said. “Her rise ball was really moving — we tried to get back in the box to let it get higher, but he was still calling it strikes. When you don’t have two strikes you don’t want to hit that because it’s not a pitch you can drive.”
The Griffins (4-2) broke a scoreless tie on an RBI single by Jenny Van Geertry that scored Olivia Prieto (walk) against pitcher Cortlyn Kelly. Kelly pitched a complete game with two earned runs, six hits, one strikeout and three walks. They added another in the fifth on an RBI single by Nicole O’Donnell (2-or-3) that scored Van Gennep, who doubled to start the inning.
Van Gennep pitched a complete game for the Griffins finishing with two earned runs, nine hits, 11 strikeouts and no walks. She gave up a leadoff double by Carrie Reilly in the seventh followed by a wind-aided double by Iliopoulos that just evaded right fielder Ami Ill. Reilly had to hold up and could only advance to third. A key error by Elna Kioussis on an infield popup set up a bases loaded single by Ileana Fierro that tied the game.
“Trinity is a great game to play, and we had a couple errors we didn’t recover from,” Lincoln-Way East coach Elizabeth Pawlicki said.
In the bottom of the eighth Blake Ruiz led off with a double off the fence but was caught stealing third on a ball in the dirt that catcher Reilly scooped up and made a perfect throw for the second out.
