Park’s softball season ends in section upset

Posted 6/8/22

With five outs to go, Park’s chances of staying alive in the 2022 Section 3AAAA softball tournament looked pretty good. Park led 5-2 in the sixth inning Tuesday, May 31, and was seemingly on their …

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Park’s softball season ends in section upset

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With five outs to go, Park’s chances of staying alive in the 2022 Section 3AAAA softball tournament looked pretty good.

Park led 5-2 in the sixth inning Tuesday, May 31, and was seemingly on their way back to the section final three. In fact, the game looked very much like a repeat of Park’s 5-2 win over Eagan in the section quarterfinals.

It wasn’t meant to be. Eagan scored four runs in the sixth inning to rally from the 5-2 deficit and earn a 6-5 win over the Park Wolfpack, thereby ending Park’s season.

Park closed the season with a 12-11 record. Not counting the pandemic year, it was the second time in three years the Wolfpack had been knocked out of section play by the Eagan Wildcats.

Park led 4-0 after three innings and was up 5-0 after four. Eagan scored twice in the fifth to close to 5-2 and then the roof fell in in the sixth inning. After one out, the Wildcats strung together five straight hits off senior pitcher Gracie Bond to shock the Wolfpack.

The Wolfpack then got set down quietly in order in the bottom of the sixth and the seventh innings. In the fifth, sixth and seventh inning the Wolfpack batters grounded out to second four times, flied out twice, struck out once and hit one right back to the pitcher for an out. No Park batter reached base in the final three innings.

It was a tough loss to take for a Wolfpack team used to competing for section titles, and Park coaches gathered the team together for a long time after the game trying to console them and encourage the returners for next season.

“I was proud of them to get to the final four,” said Loshek, who spent several minutes consoling the team’s only senior Gracie Bond after the game. “It’s just been an anomaly of a year. We’ve play well and then at times we don’t play well and unfortunately our defense is want’s giving it up for us. Gracie Bond pitched really well. She’s been the lifeline of the team the last two years because she’s been pretty much the only one in the circle. We’ve had some people help out when Gracie needed a rest, but Gracie has pitched extremely well. We just can’t make six errors a game. We made too many mental errors and if we have to figure that out.

“That’s what I talked to them about after,” Loshek added. “What can we do to get better for next year. Sure, we’ll have a lot of seniors like East Ridge has this year, but I can see East Ridge over there against Rosemount, they wanted the game. So, you can have all the seniors, you can have all the juniors, you can have all everything you want but you still have to play the game and you’ve got to play to win. And we did. For fiveand- a-half innings we did and then for some reason, Eagan wanted to play a little bit harder than we did.”

In the other game played Tuesday afternoon at Richfield, second-seeded East Ridge knocked off top-seeded Rosemount 3-2 to advance to the championship bracket. On Wednesday, top-ranked Rosemount roughed up Eagan 10-0 to advance to a rematch with East Ridge.

Second-seeded East Ridge then defeated top seeded and defending state champion Rosemount 7-1 on Friday in the second championship game and section final to advance to the state tournament. Park split with the Raptors this season, winning 8-2 in the first meeting and losing 5-1 in the second.

No. 4 White Bear Lake defeated No. 2 Stillwater in Section 4AAA to advance to state, while No. 6 Forest Lake won the Section 7AAAA crown, making it three teams from the Suburban East Conference in the state finals.

Park can return everyone on this year’s team next season, with the notable exception of Bond. And’s that’s a big exception because Bond saw almost all of the time on the mound for the Wolfpack this spring. Developing young pitchers will be the key to next season.


Wolfpack junior catcher Bryleigh Dana puts the tag on an Eagan baserunner in a section tournament game. Photo by John Molene