The Palmerston Marlins Novice ladies softball team headed to Cambridge on June 15 to 17 to play in the John Cross Memorial tournament.
This division hosted 10 teams, divided into two pools of five, with Palmerston in the “A” pool along with teams from Halton, Cambridge, Dunnville and Guelph. The teams would have to play each other in round robin format to see who would advance to the semi-finals on Sunday (only the top two finishers from both pools would move on).
First up for Palmerston on Friday night was Halton, a team the Marlins had never seen before. Not taking their opponents lightly, the Palmerston girls squeaked out a narrow 2-0 win.
Saturday morning the Marlin played the Guelph Gators. Everything seemed to go Guelph’s way and the Marlins did well just to stay in the game – eventually losing 7-1.
Next the Marlins had to play against Cambridge. Apparently having figured out what went wrong against Guelph, the regrouped Marlins punished Cambridge for a 11-1 win.
After a much-needed break before their last game of the day, Palmerston went up against Dunnville. Both teams’ energies were slowly fading but the Marlins seemed to feed off each others’ encouragement and got the job done, beating Dunnville 6-0 and securing the Marlins the 2nd seed in the ‘A’ pool.
Fighting to see who went to the gold medal game, the Marlins had to face the first seed in the ‘B’ pool: Mississauga.
Having lost to Palmerston in a previous Waterloo tournament, Mississauga had revenge on their minds heading into the game.
The Marlins went step for step with them for most of the game, but a few timely hits by Mississauga resulted in a 4-2 loss for Palmerston.
With one more chance still left for a medal, the ladies played the loser of the other semi-final: Guelph.
Having played Guelph already, the Marlins appeared to know what had to be done to win: great defence and lots of offence.
The Marlins pulled off a 10-8 come-from-behind victory to take the bronze medal.
