Childs ties single season home run record in loss
South Carolina softball’s SEC woes continued this past weekend, as it was swept for the third series in a row by the No. 8 Tennessee Volunteers.
The Gamecocks can hang their hat on one thing despite being swept again: Senior third baseman Evan Childs tied the single season record for home runs in a season on Sunday with a two-run blast in the sixth inning. Her 11 home runs lead South Carolina as a team after she hit six home runs combined in her first three years in Columbia.
“I’m not too worried about the stats, I’m just upset that it wasn’t one that was going to put us ahead,” Childs said. “I have to credit my coaches for my new swing this season, but it was cool.”
Child’s home runs didn’t stop Tennessee, which came into this past weekend’s series as one of the hottest teams in the SEC. The Volunteers are now riding a 14-game winning streak and have one of the country’s best aces in Ellen Renfroe. Renfroe has an ERA of 1.14 and 236 strikeouts in 37 appearances after this game.
“We’ve definitely seen a lot of good pitching in these past couple of series,” said head coach Beverly Smith. “Our kids have handled it very well. We don’t strikeout a lot against the top pitching and that has given them the confidence to play better down the stretch.”
In Childs’ record outing, the Gamecocks would come as close as they would all weekend in the last game of the series, 6-3. After an initial Tennessee 2-0 lead, rain in the middle of the second caused a 44-minute delay. The period after the delay brought a number of runs into the game, most of them for Tennessee. After Chelsea Hawkins produced one run in the third, Tennessee would explode for a four-run fifth inning that put the game out of reach for South Carolina, despite a two-run surge in the sixth.
“We try and learn something from every defeat we experience,” Smith said. “And this team has done that, they’ve gotten better and I like to see that we can come back in the later games of a series and score more runs in each game.”
As for the rest of the series, the first game wasn’t an ideal start for the Gamecocks when they fell to an 8-0 mercy rule loss to the No. 8 Volunteers, South Carolina’s seventh mercy rule loss this season. In a game that lasted only five innings, South Carolina allowed eight runs on only five hits, six of those runs coming in the fifth inning. Audrey Broyles would drop her eighth decision of the year lowering her record seven and nine. This game also marked the ninth time South Carolina has been shutout this year. The Gamecock offense was only able to muster three hits against Renfroe.
Game 2 saw closer competition but ended in a similar result, as the Gamecocks would drop another game to Tennessee 4-2. South Carolina was ahead in the third inning 2-0 after a Kaitlin Westfall double and a Dana Hathorn single. Ellen’s sister Ivy Renfroe took control after the third inning and didn’t allow another run to score as Tennessee scored four more runs in the last two innings to win the second game of the series.
“Our pitching staff has been very thin because of injuries this year,” Smith said. “We have the offense to get things done. If we just had some more pitchers to deepen this staff we could be a lot stronger.”