St. Charles East takes down Bartlett, 8-4

St. Charles East softball coach Kelly Barnett knows better than to let her team bask in the glow of bouncing back from Saturday's loss to South Elgin to knock off Bartlett 8-4 on Monday.

That's because this is "championship week" in the Upstate Eight Conference and Barnett's Saints are in the thick of the title hunt.

"This is a nice one but it's just one game on the schedule," Barnett said. "The most important game is the next one."

And no, Saints fans, that's not Wednesday's home matchup with rival St. Charles North, which has a half-game lead on the Saints. First, in order for Wednesday's game to be a battle for first place, the Saints must take care of business at Lake Park today and North, which beat Larkin on Monday, will need to win at East Aurora. If both those things happen, St. Charles East will take a 14-3 UEC record into Wednesday's game and the North Stars will be 14-2.

But for starters to the week, the Saints (20-8 overall) did their part on Monday. They spotted Bartlett an Elizabeth Kay leadoff home run and then rapped out 5 hits and took advantage of four Bartlett errors in the fourth to take a 5-1 lead. They opened it up to an 8-1 advantage by the top of the seventh when Bartlett scored 3 runs.

"You can't go back in time," said Saints right-hander Katie Stengler of giving up the leadoff homer to Kay. "It was just one hit and our team can hit the ball. We still had seven innings and we're hitting amazing. If we keep that up we can beat every single team we play."

Bartlett junior Callie Dennison, who committed to accept a scholarship offer from Butler on Sunday night, deserved a better fate. She had allowed just 1 hit going into the bottom of the fourth and even though the Saints did get 5 hits off her in the inning, better defense wouldn't have allowed those hitters to come to the plate.

The inning started with an outfield error on Rebecca Reinbold's belt-high line drive that opened the gate for the Saints to set up the inning. After RaeAnne Payleitner singled, Jenny Niemiec dropped a sacrifice bunt and Steph Roan delivered a double to the fence in left-center field. Roan scored on an error, Rachael Edwards singled after Bartlett dropped her foul pop up, and Beth Carignan and Mary Kate Brooks each came through with RBI singles to give the Saints a 5-1 lead.

"Callie has battled all year and if we had played defense it might have been a different story," said Bartlett coach Jim Wolfsmith, whose team has committed 12 errors in its last two games. "We have to do a better job of focusing in. All year, when we make an error, then we make another one, then we'll make a good play or two and then we'll make two more errors. You'd like to think that at this point of the season we'd be focusing in more and hopefully we will."

The Saints added a run in the fifth on Payleitner's one-out home run, and two more in the sixth - one on an error that scored Savannah Hupe and another on Claire Desrosiers' RBI single that scored Carignan.

"That's the name of the game, to put pressure on the defense," said Barnett. "That's what we do - go, go go. You have to chip away and chip away and then get some hits."

Stengler allowed the Hawks (15-13, 8-8) just 5 hits into the seventh. Bartlett tried to come back, getting a single from Kelsey Warrick and a double from Nicole Beck before Katie Popovich was hit by a pitch. Jacki Gulczynski's sacrifice fly drove in a run and Kay's double to the fence in right made it 8-4, but Kay was thrown out trying to stretch the hit into a triple and Stengler got a groundout to third to end the game.

"Don't blame Elizabeth for that, that was a poor coaching job," Wolfsmith said. "I should have left her at second but I thought that was a good spot for a triple. The right fielder made a nice throw and Elizabeth was just listening to me the whole time."

Dennison and Warrick each had 2 hits for the Hawks, as did Edwards and Carignan for the Saints.