Newton Citizen

COVINGTON -- The tradition continues for the Lady Rams softball team; it's headed back to the Class AAAAA playoffs for the eighth straight year.

The Newton girls earned their trip to postseason play as the No. 4 seed from Region 2-AAAAA and will be matched up with the No. 1 seed from Region 1-AAAAA, probably Lowndes.

In the first round of the seeding, the Lady Rams went up against a difficult Newnan team. Although Newton was able to keep pace with the Lady Cougars, they were too much to handle in the end, resulting a 9-1 loss.

"We did well against them in the first couple of innings, then they picked up on the slower pitching and drilled it," Newton head coach Virginia Waters said. "It took us too long to catch up to their pitcher."

The Lady Rams should have gone into the game to determine the No. 3 seed with some confidence, having beaten Luella 5-3 in region play. But this time the Lady Lions were able to extract a bit of revenge with an 11-3 win.

Newton had plenty of chances to put more runs on the board as Bre Weaver, Marie Diaz and Kelsey Swinson all had doubles. Unfortunately, the batters behind them were unable to move them over.

"Bre had a double; Marie had a double; Kelsey had a double, but the next two would strike out. We just couldn't put it all together," Waters said. "We didn't do well. We didn't play great defense. Letice (Albert) walked four and they all ended up scoring. There were a lot of unearned runs. We didn't hit the ball as well as we did the first time against them."