Horizon baseball, track and field wind down

Three unearned runs helped stake the visitors to a 7-3 lead after six innings in the first game. RJ Hicks hit a three-run homer onto the tennis courts beyond the left-field fence to pull Horizon within a run, But that’s where the rally ended.

“Jake (Wells) pitched well enough to win again, but we had a couple of costly errors in the earlier innings that we couldn’t overcome,” Coach Joe Petshow said. “RJ’s homer probably would have been a walk-off had we not made a couple of mistakes. Jake was getting them to hit ground balls, but we had a bad stretch where we made three errors in one inning. That was the difference.

“In the second game we cut down on our mistakes, for the most part, and we got another solid pitching effort from Micah (Engel). But we couldn’t string together enough hits.”

Engel’s lead-off homer to right field gave Horizon an early lead in game two. But the Hawk bats fell silent most of the middle innings, before they pushed across two runs in the seventh to pull within a run.

Horizon travels to Western Mennonite of West Salem to play a non-league game Thursday and the Hawks are back at Collins Field Saturday for an 11 a.m. doubleheader against Sherman County.

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Horizon Christian School’s track and field team strung together a half dozen personal bests Saturday at the Portland Christian Invitational. The Hawks didn’t have any individual winners, but had a couple of multiple placers in the day-long meet, which included 22 teams ranging in size from 50 students to 850.

Sophomore Hannah Kempf scored team points in four events. She was fourth in the triple jump (29-9.75), fifth in the 100 high hurdles (18.20) and sixth in the 200 meters (28.93).

Freshman teammate Marlie Bloomster was fourth in the 300 low hurdles in 53.94 and sixth in the high jump at 4-6. Bloomster had one good attempt at a personal best of 4-8 in the high jump, but clipped the bar with her trail leg. Mason Bloomster scored Horizon’s four team points in the boys competition with a fifth-place performance in the long jump (18-6).

Other notable performances came from junior Patrick Foss, who had a personal-best 10-foot pole vault. Foss started vaulting for the first time three weeks ago and has set a personal record each meet. Freshman distance runner, Salvador Ramirez, competing in his first high school meet, was the top Class 1A finisher with his 10th place in the 800-meter run. Ramirez also ran the 1,500, where he was 16th overall and the second 1A finisher.

Horizon has two track and field meets remaining — Friday in Glenwood and May 11 at Arlington — before the May 18 district meet at Sherman County High School.