In cold weather Lamar ices Great Falls for the win
Lamar’s Rashard Coleman helped his team come out ahead of the Great Falls Red Devils, despite the chilly temperatures March 21.
Photo by Drake Horton
By Drake Horton, Contributing Writer
LAMAR – Even adverse weather can’t stop the Lamar Silver Foxes baseball team.
On a day where spring felt like winter, with a constant wind that seemed to pierce the skin, the Silver Foxes, behind the arm of starting pitcher Mykal Mack, defeated their region counterpart, the Great Falls Red Devils 5-1 this past Wednesday night at home.
“I told the kids at the start of the year that we have to win 3-1 ball games, 2-0 games,” Lamar head coach Adam Windham said after the game. “We are going to win close ball games because we don’t hit it too well, but we play pretty good defense and throw strikes.”
Mack, who went six innings and struck out six, gave up just one run, which was unearned in the second inning resulting from back to back errors from the Silver Foxes.
“I thought we played well considering the circumstances with the weather and everything,” Windham said, discussing the weather, Mack’s pitching and his team’s defense. “We started out with some shaky defense to start with, we’ve been pretty good on defense, we cleaned that up a little bit and we played our game.
Outside of that one hiccup in the second inning, Lamar, defensively, dominated behind the pitching of Mack and kept the Great Falls hitters at bay.
The Red Devils did show some sign of life offensively in the top of the seventh with Cameron Galloway came in to close the game away, but it was more of Galloway struggling with his command than Great Falls actually doing anything spectacular.
After hitting the first batter and walking the second, Galloway finally started finding his groove striking out the next batter and getting the following one after that to ground out. He walked one more however, to load the bases before getting one more ground out to end the game.
“At the end there, Cam, we wanted to get him some work because he might throw a little bit on Friday, so we have to get him right, but just a good win, a good region win,” Windham said, explaining why he inserted Galloway into the game in the seventh.
Offensively, it was a mixed bag for the Silver Foxes. At times Lamar seemed to square the baseball up well, but at other times it struggled to make solid contact.
A majority of the Silver Foxes production came from the top half of the lineup while the bottom half struggled, except for Quan Hickman, who connected for a solo homer over the left field fence in the bottom of the fourth inning that increased Lamar’s lead to 4-1.
Lamar jumped on Great Falls in the first inning using a little luck, some “small ball” tactics and a nicely timed hit by Rashard Coleman to go up 1-0.
After Great Falls answered that run in the second inning off of Lamar’s two errors in the field, the Silver Foxes went up for good in the bottom of the third inning scoring two runs.
The first came when Jaquez Lucas scored off of an infield single by Galloway and the second came when Galloway scored following an error by Great Falls’ third baseman.
Lamar added one more run for insurance in the bottom of the sixth when the Red Devils’ right fielder dropped a routine fly ball allowing Clay Tiller to score.
With the win Lamar improved to 9-2 overall, 3-0 in the region.
Weekly Recap
Lamar played in one other game this week, a Friday home game against region rival, the McBee Panthers.
It was the Silver Foxes that came out on top, defeating the Panthers 2-0.