Last Friday and Saturday the Whitworth softball team traveled to Newberg, Oregon to take on George Fox University in order to compete for the 2018 Northwest Conference title. On Friday the Pirates took on Linfield and fell 1-5 to the Wildcats. On Saturday the Pirates came back to compete in a loser-out contest facing George Fox. The Pirates ended up falling 3-10 to the Bruins.

In Friday’s tournament, the Wildcats had a lead of 3-0 early on and ran with it. This loss put the Pirates 24-17 on the season, and moved the Wildcats up 33-8. Senior Michelle Silva led the team with a 3-4 game and one run scored. In the next inning, sophomore Natalie Edlin gave the Pirates their only run by singling home Silva in a line-drive. At 4-1 the Pirates had the chance bounce back, however Linfield’s defense prevented any further scoring. In the sixth inning junior Desi Graham attempted to single home Edlin, however was unable to leaving a total of ten runners on base over the course of the game.

Starting off strong on Saturday, freshman Sara Gayer lined a double down on the left-field line, scoring Silva and senior Chelsea Hayes. Senior Kelsey Downey used that momentum to score Gayer, giving the team a 3-0 lead. In the second inning the Pirates had runners on first and second base, and two outs. However, Graham was thrown out stealing third ending the inning. In the third inning, the Pirates found themselves facing the same scenario of Graham being thrown out.  From that point the Bruins took the lead with a grand slam, pushing seven runners across the plate in the third and fourth innings, followed by three runs in the sixth inning.

“The energy we had all weekend was awesome. We really came together as a team. Trying to put the pieces together in terms of gameplay was a bit of a challenge,” sophomore Maria Smith said. Some days [this season] our offense would rally it up like crazy, but our defense would struggle and some days we had amazing defensive plays but our bats fell silent, but this weekend we were pretty successful at both,”

The conference tournament marked the end of the Pirates season. Smith said “although we won’t be playing any more games we are looking forward to our end of season parties, and just being able to spend time together before the senior graduate and summer begin,” Smith said. This game marked the last for Silva, Hayes, Downey and Allie Rude.