Michigan high school softball: Evart needs just one hit to win D-3 title, first in history

EAST LANSING – Evart only managed one hit against Ottawa Lake-Whiteford’s super pitcher, Unity Nelson, but that was all that the Wildcats needed to win their first MHSAA championship in school history.

Mattisen Tiedt singled in the bottom half of the sixth inning to drive home Allyson Theunick from second base, producing the only run of the game in the Division 3 softball final at Michigan State University’s Secchia Stadium.

Theunick reached first base when she was hit by Nelson (a North Dakota signee), and stole second base before Tiedt drove her home.

“I went up to the plate thinking either she’s going to hit me inside, or I’m going to have to crack it outside and get a double or something. Then I hit it outside,” said Tiedt, a sophomore.

“I told Mattie she had her timing down the previous at-bat – she had two balls that just missed being fair, and I told her there’s nobody else I’d rather have up there than her,” first-year coach Shaun Gray said. “She came through for us.”

Whiteford (30-6-1) had a chance to pull out the victory in the top of the seventh, placing runners on second and third with one out, but sophomore pitcher Kyrah Gray bore down and struck out the next two batters to end the game.

“I just knew to pitch my pitch, not get overwhelmed, be confident, and know I’m a good pitcher and I can get these people out, and just don’t worry about it,” she said.

“My goodness. It was a roller-coaster,” said Shaun Gray, the pitcher’s father. “We struck the first batter out and it was easy, and then the next two batters made us work our butts off – I think both of them fouled three or four pitches off, found their way on base before Kyrah came through with the second out of the inning on a strikeout. I think we probably got a fortunate call on strike three in the end, but I ain’t complaining about it.”

Kyrah Gray allowed just five hits all afternoon, and 78 of her 100 pitches were strikes.

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Before Theunick was put on first, Evart only had three other baserunners all day – Kiera Elder and Katelyn Gostlin were both walked, and Tiedt had been hit by a pitch.

“Off the mound, I knew it was going to be a battle to get runs,” Kyrah Gray said. “We knew that we weren’t going to get 10 runs, we were going to be happy if we did, but we knew it was going to be a dogfight, so we just kept fighting until that one pitch came and we got it.”

Whiteford, meanwhile, threatened to take the early lead with back-to-back doubles in the second inning from Kaydence Sheldon and Koralynn Billau, but since Billau’s was down the left-field line, pinch-runner Ava Stevens didn’t advance past third base.

The game was also notable because it was a match-up between the teams that were defeated in the past two Division 3 finals. Standish-Sterling beat Whiteford, 1-0, last year with a run in the bottom of the seventh despite a 5-hitter from Nelson. Evart lost an extra inning game, 3-2, to Millington in 2022.

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“There’s four or five of them on this team when we were runners-up,” Gray said. “They battled this all season long. The hardest part of this season was trying to get us not to look to this point, and I thought we did a heck of a job. The proof is in the pudding, I guess.”

“We came into this game thinking it was going to be a bigger score because it’s a state championship,” Tiedt said. “We thought maybe it was going to be 5-4 or 6-5, but both teams shut each other down and it came down to one hit.”