KNIGHTSTOWN — Winning never gets old for Maddie Turner and neither does the celebration.
After striking out her 12th batter for the final out Wednesday night, Turner immediately turned to Eastern Hancock third baseman Taylor Koch and shortstop Sammie Bolding and began hopping around.
Within seconds, the rest of the Class 2A Royals swarmed the trio.
For the 27th straight game, the Royals (27-1) were victorious. For a second consecutive season, the Eastern Hancock softball team won the Sectional 42 championship.
The title marked the program’s sixth overall, fourth in six years and statistically, in a word, was seized through dominance.
Turner pitched a one-hit shutout with 12 strikeouts and the Royals’ hitters drove in their 35th runs over three sectional games to beat Indianapolis Scecina 14-0 in five innings.
More eye-popping than the Royals’ 38 hits posted over the past three games were the hits allowed by their pitching.
“Just the six,” Eastern Hancock head coach Terry Stephens remarked. “They can get frustrated when I tell them that defense wins ball games, but it really does, and they have plenty of offensive firepower, too.”
The Royals built a 3-0 lead after the first inning against Scecina behind a three-run home run for sophomore catcher Kaylee Kline, marking her 10th on the season.
After the bottom of the second, the Royals put the game away with a seven-run frame highlighted by seven hits, including a two-run double by Kline for her fifth and 38th RBI on the year.
“It’s amazing being in the lineup because you’re always expecting to get up and hit again, but it takes a lot of hard work and the right mindset,” Kline said. “(Losing last year) motivated me a lot. I was really looking forward to last year and to be able to come out and be able to play has been a lot of fun.”
The Royals were sectional champions in 2019, but as Turner joked, it almost feels like an eternity ago.
With the 2020 campaign coined the season that never was, the Royals are determined to make their 2021 a year that won’t ever be forgotten.
“It’s been since the beginning of the school year, plus these girls are doing everything during the summertime and the majority of them go home and do tee work and hitting on their own. This is a pretty special group,” Stephens said.
“I was really bummed last year when we lost that season. I was really looking at who we had and thought we were going to be really good, but then you look on paper what we had coming up, and I thought, we could be even better. It looks that way. It is that way. I think the stats speak for themselves.”
The statistics are undeniable.
Over the course of one season, the Royals are rewriting history through an on-going, record-setting winning streak that started following a 4-3 loss at 4A No. 1 New Palestine on March 22.
Since, the team has set new single-season records for wins (27), hits (339), runs (348), triples (18), home runs (51), RBI (280), stolen bases (134) and walks (113).
The only marks left to be toppled are doubles (83), batting average (.425), fielding percentage (.966) and ERA (1.26), and the first three are reasonably obtainable.
“I think people underestimate us because we’re so tiny and we don’t really have any, or at least people wouldn’t think we have any big hitters because of our size, but everybody is doing really well,” junior left fielder Caroline Stapleton said. “After we lost to New Pal, I thought, we can win state.”
Records and victories are a byproduct of confidence and chemistry, Stapleton says, and it courses up and down the batting order and in the pitching circle.
Turner racked up eight strikeouts after three innings against Scecina (8-13) and had seven straight to start the top of the second into the fourth.
This season, the left-handed Huntington recruit has amassed 134 strikeouts in 92.1 innings pitched and collected her 17th victory compared to one loss against New Palestine.
The team’s second ace, Madison Stephens, is 10-0 on the season with 96 strikeouts, including seven against Triton Central during the Royals’ 11-0, five-inning win on Tuesday in the sectional semifinals. Stephens allowed just two hits, while Turner kept Knightstown to three on Monday during the quarterfinals.
“It’s insane,” Turner remarked on the rotation’s postseason run. “We’re very hard on ourselves, so we know we’ll get the best out of us whenever we pitch.”
The same can be said for the team’s hitting, which Kline punctuated in the bottom of the first to become the team’s second double-digit home-run hitter behind Sammie Bolding’s 14.
“We’re making a statement. The first game when we played New Pal, we made a statement,” Kline said. “Even though we lost, it was still a win in our books because of how we played.”
In the bottom of the second, the Royals sent 12 hitters to the plate and in both the second and third, they logged 21 at-bats.
The results were eight hits for RBI and 13 hits overall, capped by doubles from Kaylee Stewart, Brooklyn Willis, Emma Bolding and a triple from Koch.
The team had 15 hits total with Stapleton, Stewart and Willis each going 2-for-4 with one RBI for the first two and a pair for the third.
Kline finished 3-for-3, while Koch was 2-for-3 with an RBI and Emma Bolding went 3-for-3 with two RBI. Sydni Bednarski was 1-for-3.
“My freshman year, it was about getting to regional. We knew it was going to be tough, but I don’t think we were thinking about state, next level. But now, it’s different. We’re ready to go to state. If we get through these next three games, then we’re getting to state. It’s definitely a big goal of all of ours,” said Stapleton, an ISU commit.
To get to the semistate, the seventh-ranked Royals will need to past No. 3 Union County (28-4) at the regional. Eastern Hancock beat Union County 6-3 at home on May 6 and later 11-5 on May 15 in Franklin during an in-season tournament.
“If you look on paper, we’re an evenly matched team. They’ve got really good pitching. They’ve got good hitting. They have a lot of softball experience and knowledge. It’s going to be a tough game. We are going to have to play our best game without a doubt,” Stephens said.
“But, with this group here when we go to the next game, we reset. We have to get our focus and do what we need to do. I don’t want to say that it was easy because they’ve done all the hard work before this year.”
In late May, it’s all paying off.
“It means a lot because we’ve all put in our work over the offseason, and we’ve come in and have gone undefeated after our first game. It’s special,” Stapleton said. “It’s exciting. It brings me joy knowing that what’s been put into it is bringing something out of it.”
