St. Joe's tops Softball twice

Usually the Penn softball team only loses to a better team. Sometimes it gets beaten by dumb luck. Every once in a while it's even victimized by the umpires. But in yesterday afternoon's doubleheader sweep at the hands of St. Joseph's, the Quakers simply beat themselves. The Hawks exploited five Penn errors early in game one and cruised to a 9-1 victory behind freshmen Carrie McCarthy and Jeannie Hoffman's combined one-hitter. In the second game, the Quakers (13-18) outhit St. Joe's 7-6, but squandered scoring opportunities with late-inning baserunning blunders en route to a 3-2 loss. The losses were Penn's fourth and fifth in a row. "In the first game, we made a couple of errors and then things just snowballed," junior co-captain Dawn Kulp said. "When we do bad things, we seem to do a lot of bad things." The bad things occurred right from the beginning. With Dawn Kulp on first, catcher Stacey Thompson singled up the middle. Unfortunately for the Quakers, Kulp broke the cardinal rule in baseball -- she was thrown out at third base by at least 10 feet. This was the type of poor decision-making that would plague Penn all afternoon. The bad things continued when senior pitcher Lanie Moore walked the No. 9 hitter on four pitches to open the third inning. Two errors, a walk and a double later, Moore handed the ball to freshman Melanie Bolt without retiring a batter in the inning. Bolt was almost able to stop the bleeding, but with two outs and the bases loaded, Megan Kennedy hit a rocket to the wall in center field to clear the bases and stake St. Joe's to a 6-1 lead. "We sucked," senior co-captain Rachel Walsh said. "We made bad decisions on the field and bad decisions on the basepaths." Penn blew a golden scoring opportunity in the bottom of the third on a questionable coaching move by Penn coach Linda Carothers. Trailing by five runs with runners on second and third and one out, Carothers signaled for senior catcher Stacey Thompson, the team's leading hitter with a .394 average and the only Quaker to get a hit in the first game, to bunt. Thompson fouled out to the catcher who promptly fired back to third base to double up Kulp and end the inning and the Quakers' scoring opportunity. "Sometimes we question decisions," junior Shannon Hembrough said. "But it's not our call to make. Apparently, the rules we learned in Little League don't apply in college." Moore was saddled with the loss in game one, despite giving up only one hit, four walks and one earned run in two-plus innings. But if Lanie Moore's luck was tough, freshman Vicki Moore's luck was even tougher in game two. Vicki Moore scattered six hits and didn't allow an earned run while striking out six through seven innings. "Our pitching wasn't as sharp as it has been," Kulp said. "But we pitched well enough to win." The Hawks (13-11) used an error and three singles to jump out to a quick 2-0 lead in the top of the first. Penn's bats were quiet until the fourth when senior Hilary Stamos walked and freshman Laurie Nestler (2-3 in game two and the only Quaker with more than one hit) and Kulp singled consecutively to load the bases with one out. "In the second game, we were much more aggressive at the plate," Walsh said. "We got more runners on." If only they had stayed on. Before sophomore Kristin Richeimer could deliver an RBI single up the middle to tie the game, Stamos was picked off third base on a snap throw by the Hawks' catcher, Dana Moyer. In the seventh, the Quakers shot the other foot. St. Joe's junior outfielder Colleen Fahy singled and took second on the confusion between Nestler and Abby Shore in the outfield. The Hawks took advantage of this miscue by sacrificing her to third. She later scored on an RBI single by Kristen Luciano. Then in the bottom of the inning, with the score 3-1, Richeimer led off with a single and was replaced by pinch-runner Kara Lecker. In spite of the two-run deficit, Carothers had Bolt sacrifice Lecker to second. With two outs and Lecker still stranded at second, Thompson stepped up and launched a single back through the box. Lecker easily beat the throw to the plate, but Moyer was alert enough to nail a sliding Thompson at second to end the game. "We should have won," Hembrough said. "We let down when we shouldn't have. They took advantage of it and we didn't." Mired in a five-game losing streak, and eliminated from Ivy league contention, the Quakers will have a difficult time motivating themselves for the season's final four games. "We're definitely concerned," Kulp said. "We really need to step it up before the season ends." "It's going to be hard to get up for games when we're so far down in the Ivies," Hembrough said. "But we know we can still win."

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