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Seven innings wasn’t enough to decide a winner in Monday’s battle between Morristown West and Grainger. In fact, it would take five more innings before a victor was crowned.

Blayne Parker’s infield hit scored Kaylynn Milton as the Lady Trojans won in walk-off fashion, 6-5, in 12 innings. West out-hit Grainger 15-6 and both teams struggled on defense as the Lady Trojans and Lady Grizzlies each committed five errors.

Two of those errors by West put the leadoff runners aboard to start the second and third innings. Both Shylo Williford and Jaylee Hayes were able to come around to score, on hits by Grace Lincoln in the second and Kaylee Sturgill in the third, to put Grainger up 2-0.

West got one of the runs back in the fifth when Milton doubled and scored on Addison Collins’ two-bagger. The Lady Trojans needed a run to keep the game going in the bottom of the seventh and got it when Eva Boudier led off with a single and scored on Collins’ single to knot the game 2-2 and send it to extra innings.

Grainger appeared to have the game in hand once Jaylee Hayes hammered a two-run homer to left field in the top of the 11th, but West answered in the bottom half of the inning. Khloey Oakes was placed at second base and moved over to third when Alyssa Sizemore singled. Oakes came home on an error and Boudier’s groundout tied the game and sent it on to the 12th inning.

Lincoln started the 12th at second and scored on a Rylyn Woods’ single to left. The Lady Trojans got out of a tough jam by turning a double-play. Parker came through with the big play in the home half of the inning to produce the game-winner.

“We didn’t play our best ball,” West head coach Chad Parker said. “Nothing against Grainger because they are a great, solid team but we came out flat. We hit the ball but hit it right to them. I will give it to our team as they never gave up and are very resilient. We kept telling them to battle and hang in there. Our pitching was good and we finally scored enough runs there at the end.”

Kara Dyke got the win as she had eight strikeouts. Parker said the pitch count was getting high but he decided to stick with Dyke to try to close things out.

“Kara was wearing down as she had thrown around 125 pitches at that point,” Parker said. “We thought about making a change before that but she was pitching so well, it was hard to make a change at that point. She left one over the plate and Jaylee is a great player who drove it out like she was supposed to.”

“We were able to get some timely hits and had some great base running to take advantage of that today,” Grainger head coach Ben Williford said of the game’s first two runs. “In the first meeting, things didn’t go so well for us. We had a few players out with the flu but no excuses because we didn’t play well but we are finally starting to get everything together. West is a good team who has beaten other good teams. I’m proud of the way we competed.”

Williford commented on Hayes’ big fly. “I think that was her 13th career home run and puts her in fourth in school history so she has been doing it for a while and I’m super proud of her.” The Grainger boss said he replaced his pitchers multiple times because of what

lies ahead for the Lady Grizz the rest of the week as they will face Cherokee and Greeneville. “I got us in trouble a couple of times today as I kept switching pitchers to mix it up. I didn’t want to wear out our pitchers since we have two conference games this week and we need to keep them fresh.”