Starkville Academy’s head softball coach Lee Berryhill has a simple formula for winning games – throw strikes, make routine plays and get hits. 

“You do that consistently and you’ll win a lot of ball games,” he said.

And on Friday, the Volunteers added some more evidence that his method works by capturing a season-opening 4-1 victory over Oak Hill Academy in West Point.

SA sophomore pitcher Molly Ingram led the way as she dealt seven innings of two-hit softball with 11 strikeouts and also smacked two of her team’s eight hits at the plate as the team’s leadoff hitter. 

“She’s kind of a leader because she starts in the circle with her and it also starts offensively with her,” Berryhill said. “She’s a left-handed swinger who has a lot of potential.”

Fellow Volunteer Lauren Adkerson notched two hits and scored a run, Azleigh Slivka had two hits and an RBI, Ella Kate Heflin had a hit an RBI and Emmi Miller scored a run and had a hit. But it was Oak Hill that struck first in the contest. Lily Reed captured the team’s lone run in the first inning before SA got its offense going. The Vols plated two runs in the third inning to take the lead and added one run in each of the fifth and seventh innings. Ingram’s pitching proved to be too perplexing for Oak Hill to figure out. 

“She’s pretty good,” Oak Hill head coach Lewis Earnest said of Ingram. “She located the ball well and kept it outside, away from us. We didn’t do a very good job of letting it deep, hitting it the other way. We were swinging, trying to pull the ball and it just didn’t work out, but she’s pretty good.

“We have to get a lot better at hitting. We only had two hits, several strike outs but have to get a lot better hitting. Defensively, we let a couple of pop ups fall that shouldn’t have fell that hurt us. Just a couple of things. Overall, a close game. We still didn’t play very well.”

Oak Hill’s Mary Crosley Coker and Sally Rhea Chaney each had one hit. Pitcher Kaelyn Pennington spent all seven innings in the circle, giving up eight hits and all four runs with five strikeouts. It was a strong effort by the freshman who Earnest said kept the game from getting out of hand.  

“She’s really what kept us in the game,” he said. “(She) kept them from hitting too many (hits) and kept them at bay.”

Berryhill said there are still plenty of things to work on after the first game, including fixing the two errors his team committed, but is taking the victory in stride. 

“It’s always good to open up the season with a win, just for the confidence factor because that’s what a lot of it’s about – confidence,” Berryhill said. “If you build confidence within your players, you can get more out of them. You have to be confident in what you do, and that gives us a little confidence factor in one sense of the way because we can accomplish what we want to accomplish. But at the same time, we know we have to go to work each day and we know we have to get better each day.”

Also trying to improve daily is Ingram – blessed with a long left-handed whip of an arm that Berryhill said will be a weapon for the Vols as the season wanes. It also helps that her pitches fly across the plate with blazing speed. 

“She’s a little up in her (velocity), around 56 (miles per hour), so she’s a little above average on her (velocity). But she also can mix her pitches. She’s got four pitches, three main ones that she can mix, and she throws hard enough that if she can get ahead and mix her pitches it makes her a lot better. She’s got a lot of talent. The mindset with her is, ‘How good does she want to be and how hard is she going to work to get there?’”

The season begins with a lot of action for both teams. Oak Hill, which played at Kirk Academy on Monday, plays at Carroll Academy at 6:30 p.m. tonight then hosts Hebron Christian at 6:30 p.m. Thursday. The Vols, who are in the midst of a season-opening series of away games, are back in action at 6:30 p.m. tonight at Calhoun Academy. SA was slated for a Thursday contest at Kemper Academy, but Berryhill said that game has been canceled.