The young ladies on the Purdy high school softball team are a talented group. But for those who believe in good luck charms, it’s maybe not a coincidence that the Lady Eagles have now won back-to-back district championships since the arrival of “Dinger”, a stuffed rally monkey who rests along the fence surrounding the dugout during their games.
Rightfielder Abby Parsons has become the unofficial mom of “Dinger”, calling him “her baby” as he hangs around her neck after the game.
“Coach (Lori Videmschek) just brought him in last year and he’s been with us ever since,” explained senior pitcher Breanna Keeler after top-seeded Purdy beat Southwest of Washburn 6-1 Wednesday night in the Class 1, District 10 title game at Pierce City. “And whenever we can’t find ‘Dinger’ it’s a really, really big deal.”
Keeler and her teammates really deserve the credit for the win though. Keeler allowed just one run on six hits with seven strike-outs in just over five innings of work. And she supplied the first run of the game in the second inning with a perfectly laid-down bunt right in front of home plate that resulted in a wide-throw to first to plate the run.
After a second Purdy run scored on a passed ball, Purdy added some insurance with a four-run third inning where the big hit came from senior first baseman Andrea Humphrey, who had a 1-2 count when she came through with a bases-loaded single to right scoring a pair of runs to make it 4-0. Sophomore leftfielder Mikey Schad then added an RBI double to complete the frame. Schad and Humphrey both batted .500 in the game, going two-for-four at the plate.
Purdy had defeated Southwest of Wasburn twice during the regular season but as Keeler pointed out, “last year we went up to Marionville who had beaten us twice and beat them so that was a little bit of a concern.”
“I was confident coming in because the first couple of times we played them we hadn’t hit the ball very well,” Videmschek said. “Over the last three days we had worked hard on hitting that outside pitch because Maggie (Robbins, the Souhwest pitcher) throws it really well. We worked on not hitting the high stuff, not chasing it out of the zone. And our kids did a great job of adjusting to it at the plate.”
Up next in the sectional round for Purdy is Mt. Vernon, a team they beat two out of three times during the regular season.
“I know our pitchers are gonna do what we gotta do but my biggest concern is our hitting,” Videmschek said of what she worries about with the single-elimination format of the playoffs. “We need to work on the little things like getting the bunt down, moving the runners, getting that key hit when we need to. We did that today.”
And as long as “Dinger” is around, you have to like their chances.
