Coupeville Sports

   Veronica Crownover blasted four hits Monday, including doubles to left, right and center, as Coupeville softball rallied to crunch Klahowya. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)

Cupcakes are for closers.

So it’s appropriate that while the Coupeville High School softball squad offered sugary goodies to their foes in Klahowya Monday, the only team who chose to chow down post-game was the Wolves.

When you hold fast, shrug off nerves, dodge the other team’s best shot and emerge to win, not with a whimper, but an emphatic bang, you earn your sweet, sweet dessert.

Raise your cupcakes, Wolf Nation, and hail a 12-7 win in extra innings on Coupeville’s final trip to Silverdale.

A tasty victory that came with two pressure-packed seventh-inning strikeouts from Katrina McGranahan and a hail of extra-base hits off the smokin’ bats of the CHS hurler and her teammates.

With the win, the Wolves tick multiple boxes on their checklist.

Coupeville completes a three-game season sweep of Klahowya, runs its win streak against the Eagles to six, improves to 5-0 this year against pitchers with D1 college scholarships and moves to 11-4 on the season.

Though, admittedly, getting there may have given CHS coach Kevin McGranahan a few gray hairs.

“We played a sloppy, but good, game,” he said. “We could have folded up our tents and went home with a 2-1 split with them, but instead our girls buckled down and sealed the deal.”

Halfway through the game, if you had raised the possibility of extra innings, you likely would have gotten a blank stare from most people.

Coupeville came out aggressively, sprayed hits around and built a 6-1 lead headed to the bottom of the fourth, controlling the game in almost every aspect.

That mirrored the first two times the teams tangled this season, both of which ended in lopsided Wolf wins.

CHS set Klahowya back on its heels from the first hitter, as Lauren Rose dropped a bunt that chewed through the crust of the Earth seeking a new route to China while the speed-demon Wolf zoomed to first without drawing a throw.

From there the Wolves peppered Klahowya, with Katrina McGranahan whacking a single into the hole between short and third, followed by three straight swings which produced runs.

Sarah Wright delivered the game’s first RBI on a ground-out, Chelsea Prescott plated another when an Eagle bobbled her hard chopper, and then Veronica Crownover began her all-day assault on KSS pitcher Amber Bumbalough.

Crownover, who was the driving force behind the cupcakes and offering them to Klahowya, beat the ever-lovin’ tar out of the ball, finishing with four of Coupeville’s 12 hits.

The first of her three fence-shaking doubles, in which she went to left, then right, then straightaway center in a dazzling display of pool hustler-like artistry, was a rocket that bounced off the scoreboard.

KSS managed to get out of the inning trailing just 3-0, then sliced a run off the lead when Bumbalough launched a two-out solo homer in the bottom half of the inning.

Coupeville didn’t blink, however, with ferocious frosh Prescott going yard in the third, the ball cresting the fence at its deepest point in center.

Tack on two more runs in the fourth, with Mollie Bailey and Rose tapping home thanks to a failed pick-off throw that skipped into left and a wild pitch, respectively, and the Wolves were cruising.

Until they hit a small bump in the road, than a slightly larger one, than one that threatened to knock the car completely off its wheels and throw Coupeville into a ditch.

Taking advantage of a rare rash of Wolf miscues on defense, Klahowya netted three runs in the fourth, then two more in the fifth, and suddenly, horrifyingly, a five-run lead had turned into a tie ball game.

After giving up the first three-spot, CHS had a chance to answer right back in the top of the fifth, when Hope Lodell sliced a gorgeous double that curled down the left-field line.

Having taken third on a passed ball, Lodell was primed to trot home, but Bumbalough bore down and escaped thanks to back-to-back strikeouts and a ground ball.

Facing the first of several moments in which they could have broken, but didn’t, Coupeville responded to the sudden tie by dropping an atom bomb.

It came off of the bat of Katrina McGranahan, a high, arcing shot to right-center that cleared the fence by several feet and skipped away, putting the Wolves back up 7-6.

And then things got tense. Really tense.

Klahowya put two runners aboard in the sixth, only to have Wolf catcher Sarah Wright pull off her best “gun slinger poppin’ people at high noon” act.

First the junior backstop nailed a runner trying to steal second, her throw arriving to Scout Smith’s glove two steps ahead of the incoming Eagle.

Then Wright topped that by snaring a ball that slipped out of her glove for a second, pivoting and launching a frozen rope to Prescott at third to erase another way-too-slow Eagle.

Coupeville had a chance to pad its lead in the seventh, but watched another lead-off double (this one from Crownover) wither on the vine and die before reaching home.

At the moment, it seemed like a missed opportunity, but not a fatal one.

Five minutes later the Wolves were on life support and wishing they had a time machine to go back and get a second crack at adding that insurance run.

A lead-off single, an intentional walk to the ultra-dangerous Bumbalough and a passed ball gave KSS runners at second and third with no outs in the bottom of the seventh.

Cue a tremendous defensive play, and then a gut-shot.

On a come-backer to the mound, McGranahan speared the ball, stared the runner at third down, then fired to Crownover at first.

As the ball flew across the diamond, the Eagle at third took off, Crownover stamped first, spun and fired a dart to Wright, who slapped the tag for the double play, punching the air out of Klahowya.

Or, it would have, if the second umpire hadn’t overruled the home plate guy, waving off the second out and awarding the Eagles the tying run on a (extremely) questionable interference call.

With Bumbalough, Klahowya’s fastest, smartest, most deadly, scariest runner (am I missing any superlatives here?) perched on third, and just one out, the odds of a KSS win were sitting at 97.4%.

Virtually anything hit on the ground, anything hit in the air, and she was coming home in a few strides, bringing with her a comeback win that would have sent an electric shock through Klahowya’s fan base.

Except she never got to move.

Reaching down deep into her soul and finding the killer lurking inside, McGranahan went right at the Eagles.

Strikeouts #7 and #8 on the afternoon were all the sweeter for being the one, and only thing, that could prevent Bumbalough from dancing away with the win.

As the final pitch from McGranahan to Wright hit mitt and earned a thunderous “strike three” from the ump, a cloud lifted from over the Wolves.

What could have been an extremely dispiriting loss, the kind that nags at you and eats away at your confidence, had been dodged.

And while some would say just for the moment, when the Wolves stepped to the plate to kick off extra innings in the top of the eighth, they strode to the plate with confidence fully restored.

Klahowya’s lineup was comprised of nine dead women walking from that moment.

Rose eked out a free pass, Smith reached on an error and then the middle of the order launched an RBI parade.

McGranahan and Wright brought runners around with wicked liners, a third run came flying in courtesy a passed ball and Crownover put the frosting on her cupcake-worthy performance.

She didn’t double this time, just whacked a two-run single up the middle to cap a five-run explosion, more than enough to make mom Kelly lose the last of her voice screaming like a wild woman in support of her “baby.”

As Coupeville’s baseball squad drifted over after clinching a league title, McGranahan drove the final stake through the heart of Silverdale’s finest, retiring the Eagles in order without allowing the ball out of the infield.

It was a fitting end to a rivalry which started one-sided and ended one-sided, just with the teams flipped.

After Klahowya won all six games between the teams during the first two years of the Olympic League, Coupeville flipped a switch starting in 2017.

Six wins, and one enormous gut-check later, the Wolf sluggers have earned their cupcakes. All of them.

Read Full Post »