Osceola County's two playoff softball teams couldn't extend the season Thursday.
At Harmony, the Longhorns (10-8) couldn't match the big hits of Jupiter (18-5), and fell 12-4 in a Region 7A-3 quarterfinal game.
Down in Port St. Lucie, St. Cloud fell to Centennial, 2-0.
Harmony pitcher Lindsay Green cruised early, striking out four of the first five batters on the way to fanning eight in 5 2/3 innings, but the Warriors built a 4-0 lead in the third inning on two-run singles by Amanda Drinkwater and Sasha Seidel.
The Longhorns answered right back with two in the bottom of the fourth. Emerson Aslan's RBI double plated Amanda Whelan, who walked to lead off the inning, and Haley Diaz's sacrifice fly scored Green, who singled.
But, Harmony would get no closer, as Seidel hit another two-run single in the fifth and Jupiter put up six runs in the sixth to put it away. Shyanne Dumford added an RBI groundout that scored Haley Diaz in the sixth that made it 12-3 and staved off the 10-run rule, allowing seniors Ireland Sibbett and Amanda Whalen to bat one more time again in the seventh and single. Green scored Sibbett on a sac fly. Whalen and Sibbett each had two hits.
An emotional Harmony Coach Kristi Mindrup had a hard time finding the words to send off a group of seven seniors -- Sibbett, Whalen, Katelyn Luna-Rodriguez, Dumford, Angelica Castro, Dominica Kohout, Paige Bartlett and Madeline Thielmann. It's a group that lost most of its freshman season to COVID-19.
"We just didn't execute when we needed to execute," she said about the game. "Their pitcher (Amanda Lieberman) had a great changeup, we were waiting on it but we just popped it up."
Whelan was part of a senior class that brought the Longhorns their first district championship since 2014. "High school has been side-to-side, things you don't expect to happen," she said.
"This group, to know them is to love them, everything about them," Mindrup said.
