By Chuck Reherman
Sports Editor
In the first full week of the season, Yukon had been looking for one thing.
More offense.
The Millerettes found it this week.
Yukon erupted for five runs in the fourth inning to break open a close game and rolled to an 11-3 over Edmond Santa Fe in a District 6A-2 game Thursday night at the Millerette Softball Complex.
YHS had also used a five-run inning on Tuesday night in a 10-4 win over Norman.
The Millerettes, 5-2, improved to 3-0 in district play and into first place in the district race. Santa Fe had come into the game with a 7-1 record and a 3-0 district mark before suffering their first district loss.
“What I liked is that we kept pushing,” Millerette head coach Katy Hoke said. “They never got satisfied to just be ahead. They kept trying and kept working at it and working at it and that is what I like to see. Home runs are fun, but you have to keep working, pushing and manufacturing runs.
“It was another district win for us and that is the main thing that mattered tonight,” she added. “We want to get our district games played and be at the top and hopefully we can continue doing that.”
Hoke did make some changes to the batting order and it worked for the Millerettes Thursday night. Leading 3-1 in the fourth inning, YHS broke the game open with five runs that made it an 8-3 game.
“We have an idea of what the kids are doing, but things change when a team goes with a different pitcher, we still have some kids on the bench that are very good and are fighting to get a chance to play. My hope is that we can make some adjustments and get some time into games. But, I like the line-up we had tonight and how it is working.
“We did shuffle around our batting line-up and hopefully we can get some people on that the middle of the line-up can hit them in and that is what we did tonight,” she said. “Edmond Santa Fe had good pitching and were 7-1 coming in, so that was a great win. They have a great coach, she has a good program that fights hard and I’m happy we kept pushing and got as many points as we did. District points, when it comes down to a tie, we need all the points we can get.”
The Millerettes took control of the game in the fourth with the five-run inning, keyed by Taylor McMahon’s two-RBI triple. Gigi Vandelune had doubled in the first run of the inning (Maddie Montgomery, who had singled) and after an error, McMahaon tripled, then scored on a passed ball to open the 8-1 lead.
YHS added three more runs in the sixth on a McMahon RBI single and an RBI double from A.J. Rayburn.
Ariah Mitchell had given the Millerettes the lead in the first with a solo home run and leading 2-0 in the third, Rayburn slugger her fourth home run of the season to make it a 3-0 game.
On Tuesday night, the Millerettes also used a five-run inning to break open a close game and posted a 10-4 win over Norman.
YHS was leading 5-3 in the sixth inning and used a three-run home run by McKenna Johnson to take control of the game. Rayburn also had an RBI single in the game.
“I’m glad they starting hitting line drives and ground balls to make Norman do something different than catch flyballs,” Hoke said. “We had a good start, we jumped out awesome. But, when we get runners at third, we need to find aways to still manufacture runs.
“We are getting more comfortable with this line-up,” she said. “We talked about communications and still each others learning range.”
