Center Grove’s Riley Henson delivers a pitch during Johnson County championship game against Indian Creek.
Rob Baker | For the Daily Journal
Prior to the season, Center Grove softball coach Alyssa Coleman knew she was going to have to cobble together a makeshift pitching staff to hold the fort while senior ace Riley Henson gradually worked her way back from offseason surgery.
Depth was built out of necessity — and with Henson nearly all the way back, the Class 4A No. 9 Trojans have an impressive array of arms at their disposal. Most of them were on display during the team’s march through the Johnson County tournament, which was capped by a 6-1 triumph over Indian Creek on Saturday afternoon at Russ Milligan Field.
Center Grove (17-6) allowed just one run across 17 innings through three tournament games.
“We just have each pitcher really killing their role,” Coleman said. “I am very confident in all of our pitchers that, whoever’s out there, we’ve got the defense behind them — and throughout the season, they all just keep getting better.”
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Henson, who pitched three innings during an 11-0 semifinal win over Greenwood in the late morning, took the ball to start the final and worked another 2 2/3 against the Braves (12-9). She put down eight of the first nine hitters she faced, four of them on strikeouts, before yielding a run and hitting her 70-pitch limit for the day.
Sophomore Riley Fuhr then took Center Grove through the fifth inning before giving way to freshman Taylor Barrett, who registered the final six outs.
Having other capable pitching options has helped take the pressure off of Henson, who underwent “a little more in-depth Tommy John surgery” in late August that made repairs to her ulnar collateral ligament (UCL), ulnar nerve and triceps in her left arm.
“It’s been really nice to have people behind me, because in past years I didn’t have that help — and that’s what got me to being injured,” Henson said. So now that I have help, it really makes it easy to take my time and make sure everything’s good with my arm before I jump back into it.”
The Trojans led throughout but didn’t put the game away until the top of the seventh, when it struck for three insurance runs against Creek reliever Delaney Jones. With one out and runners on first and second, Brynn Meyer delivered an RBI double that scored Mae Munson and stretched the lead to 4-1. Riley Janda followed with another two-bagger to the wall in center field, bringing in Hannah Haberstroh and Meyer.
Center Grove took advantage of an Indian Creek mistake to put a run on the board in the first inning, as a throwing error on a bunt allowed Meyer to get all the way to third base. Meyer then scored on a groundout to first base by Janda. The tourney hosts got another small-ball run in the top of the third as catcher Madisyn Tharpe drew a leadoff walk, and courtesy runner Kynadee Warner moved to second on a Munson bunt, took third on a wild pitch and came home on a sacrifice bunt by Haberstroh.
The bottom of the third inning saw the Braves get back within a run with a two-out rally against Henson. Kristen Soots dropped the team’s first hit of the day into shallow left field, and fellow freshman Jada Shepard followed by poking a fly ball just past the reach of Haberstroh in center, resulting in an RBI triple.
In the fifth, Tharpe hit a single and took second on an error in the outfield. A base hit by Munson put runners on second and third and chased Indian Creek starter Lexi Smith. Haberstroh got to Jones for a sacrifice fly, scoring Warner to make it a 3-1 game.
The Braves’ Madi Bracken led off the bottom of the inning with a single to right, but Tharpe snuffed out any real potential for a big inning when she made a diving stab of a foul pop by Smith and fired over to first in time to beat Bracken back to the bag for a double play.
Coleman credited Smith and Jones with keeping her hitters off balance for most of the game, but she remained confident throughout that her lineup would crack the code eventually.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that we will always break through,” she said. “This team does not quit. They are resilient, and they will find a way.”
The Braves had to do some work just to reach the title game, with Jones hitting home runs in both the sixth and seventh innings to lift her team past Franklin, 4-3, in one semifinal game.
Indian Creek coach Gary Mitchell was proud of how his team handled a gauntlet of three good Class 4A teams in less than 24 hours and believes it bodes well for the stretch run.
“We’re getting ready for the next couple of weeks, to go do what we’ve got to do in 3A,” he said. “We’ve got to finish our schedule with some tough teams, some tough pitching, and we get to go into the Owen Valley Sectional and play some good quality teams down there. But if we can play like we did this weekend, we’re going to be just fine.”
Center Grove, meanwhile, also continues to build toward the postseason. Henson hopes to be able to throw up to 80 pitches per day — the max recommended by her physical therapist for this season — by then, and she’s confident that her teammates will be able to fill in the gaps.
“This tournament helped us out a lot,” she said, “because we were having some struggles just trying to figure out how we are as a team and what could make us better off, and I think this tournament really boosted our confidence. Our energy was much better, and I think we’ll be ready for sectionals.”
“At the end of the day, you’ve got seven innings,” Coleman added, “and it’s looking like we’re a really hard seven innings, especially when you’re seeing a new pitcher all the time.”
