TAUNTON, Mass. – Four defensive assists, two strikeouts and a two-run double in the first three innings alone previewed what would be a busy night for Taunton junior pitcher and leading hitter Aimee Kistner.
Kistner drove in three runs at the plate while pitching six innings of one-hit ball in the circle, as Taunton avenged a 2014 first round loss to Notre Dame Academy with a 9-2 win in the D1 South Semifinal on Thursday night.
“She was on tonight,” Taunton head coach Dave Lewry said of Kistner. “She was swinging the bat real well and she squared up a couple of balls tonight.”
Kistner’s first double came in the third inning as she laced a line drive to left center field that one-hopped the fence, scoring both Kelly Reading and Jaime Brown.
“That was the first time we really squared a ball up,’ Lewry said. “I think that really livened everybody up and they said ‘Let's go swing the bats’ and they did.”
In the fifth, another Kistner double scored Reading all the way from first base and gave the Tigers a 4-0 lead. Taunton tacked on three more runs in the inning as a Meghan Navarro sacrifice bunt scored Kistner’s courtesy runner Liana Duarte from third. Kya Enos then singled in Navarro, and Amber Wainwright doubled home Enos.
In the sixth, Brown singled in Hailey Medeiros, who ran for Sarah Bagge after she led off the inning with a base hit. Reading scored the ninth Taunton run on a sacrifice fly by Jordan Wade.
Katie Van Zandt drove in the third Taunton run of the game, slicing a single to right field that scored Navarro from second.
“They have a good lineup with good hitters,” Notre Dame head coach Jack Finn said. “I have no complaints. I don’t mind losing to a good team. Their pitcher was good and she was on tonight.”
Kistner allowed just one hit over the course of six innings of work while striking out four batters. Leadoff hitter Kaleigh MacDonald reached on a two-base error to start the fourth inning, but Kistner got out of the inning unscathed with a groundout, strikeout and fly out. A sacrifice fly by Megan Buckley and a double by Hillary Dole accounted for the only Notre Dame runs of the contest in the sixth.
Courtney Fisher pitched the seventh inning for Taunton, allowing a leadoff walk but striking out the next three batters, all swinging, to preserve the win.
Lewry credited the production from the bottom of the order as a reason for his team’s success so far in the postseason. Seven different Tigers recorded RBIs in the game, and the two that did not, Reading (3-4) and Bagge (2-3), had multiple hits.
“We had a lot of hits from the bottom of the order tonight,” Lewry said. “We went through a stretch this year where we weren’t getting that. We were getting it from the first half of our lineup and not the bottom but the bottom seems to have picked it up lately and hopefully we can keep it going for another game and go from there.”
Taunton, now 23-2 on the season, advances to its first D1 South Final since 2008 and will face #2 Silver Lake on Saturday at 11:00 AM in Taunton.