The Hampton-Dumont-CAL baseball team kept in contention, but Boone took advantage of extra outs in Friday’s 3A Substate 3 first round game at North Polk High School, as aired on 99 The Wave.
The Bulldogs led for a large portion of the game, and for the most part, played sound defense. They found the scoreboard in the second inning when Hunter Rieken doubled to drive in Taylor Mahler, and it was 1-0 Hampton-Dumont-CAL for the next two innings. However, some miscues haunted the Bulldogs in the fourth inning. The Toreadors were given extra outs to work with due to errors, and made the Bulldogs pay. They tied the game with a score on a passed ball, followed shortly thereafter by a bases-clearing double to score three more. After Boone added one more in the sixth, the Bulldogs got runners to first and third, but couldn’t connect on further hits, and the game ended with no more scoring. Having been defeated 10-0 in six innings by the same team a week ago, Head Coach Matt Lokenvitz says the Bulldogs showed grit and performed well as underdogs.
“The longer a team that’s not supposed to win, us, obviously being the lower seed, not supposed to win this one, the longer you can hold a lead, the tighter the home team or the better team seems to get,” Lokenvitz says. “And so that’s what we were trying to do. We’re just trying to keep the lead for as long as possible to see if they could get tighter, we would play looser, that type of stuff. Then in the fourth inning, we just kind of had a hiccup of an inning, hit a kid, walked a kid, but we still had a chance to get out of that. But again, to go back to how proud I am, they didn’t let that beat them. They scored the four runs there in the fourth, get up 4-1. We could have imploded, you know, with ah, they beat us by 10 last week. Here we go type of thing. And they didn’t, they hung with them and they battled and battled and battled. Dawson pitched a heck of a game today, being a senior on the mound for us and gave us every opportunity to win this game.”
Jaymes Stevens and Hunter Rieken each had two hits. Dawson Wikert pitched the complete game with three strikeouts and two walks. Only two of the five runs given up were earned.
The Bulldogs have ended their season at 7-21.
Matt Lokenvitz interview:
