Rice baseball falls to Edna in close one

ALTAIR — The Rice High School baseball team had a home match with Edna High School April 22 at Raiders Field and went down by a final score of 3-0.

Edna struck early and was able to add an insurance run later in the game while playing lockdown defense in order to shut out Rice.

“The biggest difference was the first batter of the game, we made a little lazy mistake,” said Rice head baseball coach JT Ber- ry. "Sometimes that's the way the cookie crumbles. As long as we take away the small mistakes within the game, that flips our whole mentality and things like that. We're starting to come together. The next piece of changing the whole culture of the program is putting that piece of hitting. We've taken a lot of strides this year and when we jump off the bat with a good, solid inning, it changes our direc- tion. We're starting to get where we wanna be. We're not there yet. It takes time and we know that.

We just gotta start the game off with the right plays." Edna tallied their first run in the top of the first inning on a grounder that resulted in a wild throw, a walk, a steal, and a grounder that caused a throw home that was botched. Another botched ball in the same inning scored Edna's second run.

The scoreboard stayed the same for the majority of the game until the top of the sixth inning when Edna notched a base hit to centerfield after a walk. Rice threatened to rally in the bottom of the seventh inning with a walk by Jaren Brown and a grounder to third that was botched, then Edna closed the game with a fly out, a picked off runner at first, and a strikeout to secure the 3-0 win.