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An incredible performance in the circle and back-to-back home runs helped Texas stave off elimination and force a deciding Game 3 of the Fayetteville Super Regional on Friday.
Katie Cimusz and Janae Jefferson supplied the pop to start the third inning and Hailey Dolcini gutted it out for seven innings in the Longhorns’ 3-1 win over Arkansas at Bogle Park.
Texas seemed to grab momentum before the third-inning long balls, as it escaped the top half of the inning having allowed only one run.
Danielle Gibson gave the Razorbacks the lead with a two-out RBI single, but it could have been more. They still had runners on the corners and the dangerous Hannah Gammill at the plate.
The suspense built as Gammill fouled off eight straight pitches, worked the count full and then fouled off seven more. Finally, 10 minutes after she first stepped into the box, she hit the 20th pitch of the at bat back up the middle.
The second baseman, Jefferson, drove to her right and snagged it right behind the second base bag, which she touched to get the force and end the inning.
“Obviously the crowd was awesome, they were rooting her along to continue the at bat, and I’m like, ‘Man, can we get an out or do something?’ because it was a long at bat,” Texas head coach Mike White said. “It comes down to moments, certain key moments in the game (and) that very well could’ve been one.”
Sure enough, the Longhorns used the momentum to immediately grab the lead in the bottom half of the third.
Cimusz, the 9-hole hitter, smacked the third pitch of the inning over the left field wall to tied it up and Jefferson — who had just made the big play defensively — followed with a blast to center that gave Texas a lead it wouldn’t surrender.
“They got back in the dugout and they were fighting for their pitcher and that’s when they capitalized with the runs,” head coach Courtney Deifel said. “We honestly just never grabbed it back. I think that we had this, ‘Oh crap,’ moment that we never exhaled out of it.”
Mary Haff, who started the game, bounced back with a strikeout after the back-to-back home runs, but was relieved after allowing another single. That runner eventually came around to score on Mary Iakopo’s RBI double off Chenise Delce.
All three runs were charged to Haff, while Delce kept the Razorbacks in the game with 3 2/3 scoreless innings.
However, they couldn’t do anything offensively against Dolcini. Despite being in obvious pain and having her worked on in the dugout between innings, the Texas ace retired 13 of the final 14 batters she faced, beginning with the key Gammill at bat in the third.
“We didn’t make great adjustments,” Deifel said. “That’s typically what this offense does, too, is make great adjustments, learn from each other and have better at bats as we go. We had a lot of lazy fly balls today, just really didn’t square it up. That’s being off time, that’s stretching the zone, all of that is connected.”
A day after throwing 105 pitches in 4 1/3 innings in Game 1 of the super regional, Dolcini threw 129 in Friday’s complete game victory. Including three complete games in the Seattle Regional against Washington, she threw 535 pitches over a seven-day span.
The Longhorns needed every single one of them in order to keep their season alive and force a winner-take-all game against the Razorbacks with a spot in the Women’s College World Series on the line.
“We’ve responded all year in a mature, businesslike way, so that gives me confidence we’ve been businesslike coming off a bad game before,” Gibson said. “It’s a game, and today we just didn’t fight like we normally do. Tomorrow we’ll respond, so I have no worries.”
First pitch is scheduled for 3 p.m. CT and the game will be televised on ESPN.
