By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
It’s not about just getting to the state tournament, that’s what you’ll hear coaches tell you when they reach this final step in the post-season. It’s about keeping the winning going.
Not.
Not if you’re that most unlikely of Ninth Region champions the way the Holy Cross Indians were in their Friday debut at the Clark’s Pump-and-Shop KHSAA State Softball Tournament at UK’s John Cropp Stadium.
Getting here was an accomplishment plenty enough on its own for the small parochial school from Latonia that often seems to punch above its own weight. Whatever, it was not going to surpass that here.
After all, the Tribe, as they like to call themselves, had managed to bounce back from a regular season that saw them lose their first two games by a combined 19-2. And lose games in Northern Kentucky by scores of 23-3, 11-0,18-0 and 9-0 to region semifinalist Ryle in the regular season.
But it was that holy Cross High, enrollment 321, that managed to beat three teams – Dixie Heights (1,511 enrollment), Ryle (2.077) and Highlands (1,019) – with a combined enrollment of 4,607 – in three straight Ninth Region games and that’s accomplishment enough for one season.
“I don’t want anything to take away from that,” said Holy Cross Coach Courtney Turner after the Indians found themselves on the short end of a 13-0 whacking by Harrison County in a run-ruled six innings Friday morning.
Getting past a 30-win Harrison County team was not happening against a powerful lineup from Cynthiana that looked like each girl could bench press her Holy Cross counterpart.
“I definitely think this is the best team we’ve played all year,” Turner said of her Holy Cross team that finished 18-13. “Yeah, that was a tough team,” she said of the Filliies from Cynthiana who wasted no time, scoring six runs before they’d recorded six outs.
It was 6-0 after 2 ½ innings and another Ninth Region team was on its way to extending a state tournament losing streak that extends back to Notre Dame in 2017 by putting up, as one press box wise guy suggested, “doughnuts on National Doughnut Day.”
Or maybe by walking intentionally to load the bases when Harrison’s Owyn McCoy, who hit her first two home runs of the season earlier, came up for a third time. The score – 9-0 after five innings – seemed almost incidental here except for the fact that it would take just one more to run rule this game and end it early.
Which happened in the sixth the next time McCoy came up and blasted a two-RBI shot for her sixth and seventh RBI of the day in a four-run sixth for a 13-0 Harrison lead.
Although the Indians had taken some of the sting out of this one by breaking up Shyanne Ross’ no-hitter with a pair of pop fly singles over short by Kayla Fledderman and Zakyah Ryan in the fifth for the Indians’ lone hits of the day.
A short trip for the Indians. But they made it here. No one else from Northern Kentucky did.
That’s what Turner was telling her players after the game. “The fact that we’re here is a huge boost to Holy Cross,” Turner told them. “I don’t want anything to take away from that.”
As for the underclassmen on a roster dominated by freshmen and eighth graders, even a seventh grader — 10 in all, “to see where we started and ended up is huge,” Turner said, and the message was that they could do it again in their careers.
“This team’s like a family,” Turner, a Holy Cross alum herself, told them. “We know what it’s like to be an underdog.”
So she left them with this: “Remember that feeling of getting here . . . it’s every players’ dream to be playing on UK’s field. It definitely gives us confidence even when it’s a tough loss.”
SCORING SUMMARY
HARRISON COUNTY 213 034—13 11 1
HOLY CROSS 000 000 0 2 4
WP: Ross (14-2) LP: Thomas (15-12)
Hitters: (all Harrison County): McCoy 2 HR, 7 RBI; Ross 2-4, double; Highlanders 2-3, double, 2 RBI; Hamm, double; Newby, 2-3, 2 RBI;