Blown away: Seymour ends Lady Tornadoes' season with 10-0 rout

By Ryan Callahan
of The Daily Times Staff

The Alcoa softball team ended the regular season last week as one of the undisputed favorites to contend for the District 3-AA Tournament championship.

A lot has changed since then.

The Lady Tornadoes ended their season in the district tournament for the second consecutive year Friday, falling one win short of a berth in the Region 2-AA Tournament with a five-inning, 10-0 loss to third-seeded Seymour in the losers' bracket finals.

Alcoa (19-12), the tournament's host and No. 2 seed, could have advanced to play top-seeded Gibbs in Friday night's championship game and clinched a spot in next week's region tournament with its third win of the season against the Lady Eagles.

Instead, the Lady Tornadoes committed seven errors and finished with only two hits in a sluggish performance hardly representative of a team that lost only three district games during the regular season.

"I thought we should have had more life about us," Alcoa coach Paul Talley said.

"We went out and played nervous. We didn't play well under pressure. Like I told (the players), that's my fault for not putting pressure on them in practice so that they're used to it when it happens in games."

The Lady Tornadoes had fought through the losers' bracket with back-to-back wins Wednesday over Carter and Fulton, bouncing back from a 7-2 loss to Seymour in their tournament opener Tuesday.

The rematch, however, turned out even worse.

The Lady Eagles, who had suffered their own five-inning, 10-0 loss to Gibbs earlier in the day, scored in every inning and pounded Alcoa sophomore pitcher Nicole Tidwell (18-11) for 10 runs -- only three of which were earned -- on 10 hits.

With the help of three errors by the Lady Tornadoes, Seymour took a 2-0 lead in the first and never looked back.

"I think people were pressing real hard and just trying to make things happen instead of just doing routine things," said Alcoa senior third baseman Arika McDonald, who had one of the Lady Tornadoes' two hits.

"It was very, very out of character. We had errors, and I had throwing errors, and that never happens. The people that made errors usually don't make them."

No. 9 hitter Brittani Raulston stretched Seymour's lead to 3-0 with a solo home run to left-center field in the second, and the Lady Eagles added three more runs on a two-out error in the third.

They later ended the game with a pair of runs in both the fourth and fifth innings.

"(Seymour) just came out ready to play," Talley said. "We came out Wednesday night against Carter and Fulton, and Carter we just got by. (Against) Fulton, we played pretty well. I really thought after that we'd be ready to go (Friday night). But we weren't."

As for Alcoa's fielding miscues, which included six throwing errors, Talley said, "That's the most errors we've made in a long time -- ever, probably."

A relatively youthful roster returning next year for Alcoa could ease the growing pains associated with the pending departures of three seniors -- McDonald, catcher Kaylee Garrett and reserve Haley Murphy.

Talley wasn't ready Friday to shrug off the disappointment of another early postseason exit. But he admitted the Lady Tornadoes might have been fortunate to have accomplished what they did with essentially one proven pitcher and a lineup that often struggled to score runs.

"We had a good year," Talley said. "At the first of the year, with one pitcher, I was really apprehensive about what we could do. I mean, we've got people playing out of position by necessity because we just don't have another person.

"What they did was really impressive."