Jackson closes out home slate with win over Kelly

Jackson's record-setting season continues with a 6-3 home win over Kelly on Monday, May 8 in Jackson.

Carson McDaniel threw a complete game for in Indians, allowing three runs on five hits with 10 strikeouts.

"I think that Carson McDaniel came out and did what he's done all year, pitched really well, threw a lot of strikes, changed speeds, hit locations, kept their hitters off balance quite a bit," Jackson head coach Josh Roach said. "When they got contact, most of it was really soft."

The Indians got on the board in the first inning on an RBI single by Cooper Rhodes. Grant Dotson added a run in the second inning on an RBI single of his own.

A triple by Quintin Borders and a single by Baden Hackworth extended the Jackson lead to 4-0 in the third inning. The Indians racked up 10 hits during the game, led by Rhodes and Hackworth collecting multiple knocks off Kelly starting pitcher Drew Klipfel.

"We knew we were going to be facing a soft-tossing lefty," Roach said. "I felt like they had a really good approach, not trying to do too much, go the opposite way quite a bit, and for the most part, they did a pretty good job."

The Hawks scored their first run off a sacrifice fly in the fourth inning. The Indians responded with two runs in the fifth inning. Rhodes scored on an error and Steven Schneider hit a single to score Caden Bogenpohl, who reached on a base hit and stole two bases.

Kelly scored the final two runs of the game in the sixth inning off the bats of Nicholas Christian and Mason Eubanks. Michael Dollins went 2-for-3 at the plate to lead Hawks in hits.

"When you have a team, Kelly has a good team, and you kind of have an opportunity to put them away, you do that," Roach said. "That's something that we haven't done a great job of that this year and that's an area where we can definitely get better. We did do a good job of extending our lead pretty much every inning after to add to it, and that's that was a positively good thing. I think we had opportunities in that game to where we could probably, you know, added three or four more runs but we just couldn't get it done."

Klipfel took the loss for Kelly after going five innings, allowing six runs on ten hits, striking out five, and walking one.

Jackson (26-6) travels to Christian Brothers College on Tuesday, May 9, and will finish the regular season on Wednesday, May 10, at Perryville.