SOUTH WHITLEY – North Miami junior Josie Wood lived up to the hype Monday evening at Whitko. The leader of the Class 1A No. 1 North Miami softball team, Wood struck out 15 Whitko Lady Wildcats in a 10-0, six-inning victory, while also going 4 for 4 at the plate with a home run, a double, four runs and three RBIs. “She’s an outstanding softball player, and the girls usually feed off her when she’s having that type of a performance,” North Miami coach Rob Cooley said of Wood, who’s already committed to pitch at Indiana University. “It just leaks throughout the entire team.” The southpaw entered the Three Rivers Conference game with a 0.08 ERA and hitting .597. Showing an array of pitches, she ran her season total of strikeouts to 187 in 92 innings, an average of two per inning. “She obviously has the speed,” Whitko coach Brad Clark said of Wood. “She has a number of pitches and throws very well. She throws a lot of strikes early in the count, so if you’re behind, you have to chance balls out of the zone to protect. The best thing she does is throws strikes and make you play her game.” After her team jumped in front 3-0 in the first inning, Wood set the tone by striking out Whitko’s side in the bottom of the frame. North Miami tacked another three runs on in the top of the second, and Whitko opened the bottom half of the frame nicely with a leadoff single by freshman Hanna Yohe, but that was nullified after Wood struck out the next three Lady Wildcats. In all, Whitko got three hits off Wood, while the Lady Warriors had 13 hits and improved its season record to 19-3 and 4-1 in the TRC, while Whitko sits at 7-13 and 4-2 in the conference. Yohe was hit with the loss, going all six innings, but Clark feels she did what she was supposed to do, but the defense wasn’t as sharp, committing four errors. “She did a fairly good job,” he said of Yohe. “She did what we ask our pitchers to do, which is letting (the batters) put it in play. Then, we ask our defense to rally behind her. I think there’s a couple things, defensively, that we need to clean up – just a few balls here and there that I think could have protected a few runs.” Against a team of North Miami’s caliber, a win would have been tough to predict, so Clark was looking for some other things in the game. “I was just looking to see how we’d respond,” he said. “Anytime you play somebody that good, you want to see if the team shrinks or rises to the challenge. I think we did a little of both.” Things don’t get much easier for Whitko in its TRC finale Wednesday, as it travels to Class 3A No. 3 Rochester, a team that downed North Miami 2-1 on May 12.
