Staff photo / Neel Madhavan. Mineral Ridge’s Laney Rigley, left, tags out Badger’s Sarah Betts while she slides into third base during their sectional bracket final matchup Wednesday evening.

VERNON — Mineral Ridge has been either hot or cold all season long.

The Rams opened the year with three straight losses, but then put together a four-game win streak in the middle of the season. Prior to the start of the playoffs, Mineral Ridge had lost back-to-back games — a heartbreaker to Jackson-Milton and at home to McDonald.

However, that was last week. The Rams now find themselves playing some of their best softball of the season and have won three games in three days this week, including Wednesday’s 13-2 victory over No. 8 seed Badger to advance to districts in Division IV.

“The girls are ramped up — they’re playing their best ball at the end of the season, just like we wanted them to,” said Rams co-head coach Joe Merolillo. “Everyone’s hitting, everyone’s contributing and that’s what we need (to be successful).”

Fielding a young squad with just one senior in Maddy Ylonen, the Rams have had to grow up in a hurry this year, learning and improving through trial by fire.

“I’ll be honest, it was hard, especially early on, getting them to buy in,” said Mineral Ridge co-head coach William Sandy. “Maddy was really the girl that everybody kind of looked up to and that was a new sort of role for her. She’s embraced that and kind of run with it, and now our juniors, sophomores and even freshmen are really starting to step up. I hear different voices in the dugout, and as a coach that makes me really proud.”

Ylonen does a little bit of everything for the Rams. She’s the team’s ace in the circle and one of the team’s best power hitters. Against the Braves, she pitched seven strikeouts in six innings of work, while going 3-for-4 at the plate with two RBIs.

As she’s embraced being the team’s leader, Ylonen has had to learn to balance the role, while still maintaining her relationship with her fellow teammates.

“It’s been a great experience for me,” Ylonen said. “I came in (this season) having to learn how to balance being a leader and also being a teammate. Through that, I’ve progressed into being what (my teammates) call a leader.”

As a result of the team’s growth and Ylonen developing into her role, Mineral Ridge is putting it all together now.

After a slow start that found them in an early one-run deficit against Badger, the Rams put together a six-run third inning that gave them the lead for good.

“We definitely waited on the ball better than we did at the beginning of the game,” Ylonen said. “I think that was the major difference.”

As Mineral Ridge cycled through the order during the inning, the team strung together hit-after hit, finishing the inning with seven.

Badger had chances to make plays on some of the balls, but fielding errors ended up being costly.

“We got the error bug again — all those six runs weren’t earned,” said Badger head coach Greg O’Brien. “So that just started it off, and then we came back in the fourth inning and did the same thing. Just the errors got us.”

Mineral Ridge scored three more runs in that fourth inning, before finishing up the game with four additional runs in the sixth and final inning.

In all, the Rams finished with 16 hits, getting at least two hits from six different players. Laney Rigley and Ava Busse led Mineral Ridge with three RBIs apiece.

With the loss, Badger ends the season 9-10.

“We’ve been up and down, and (Wednesday) was one of those down days,” O’Brien said. “We’ve had our moments (this year) and we fought through it. We’ve got a good group of kids, we just didn’t get it done (Wednesday).”

Mineral Ridge now advances to the district semifinal, where it will face top-seeded Western Reserve on Monday at 5:30 p.m. The Blue Devils beat the Rams twice early in the season.

“We’re a better team now than we were back then,” Sandy said. “We’ve preached from the very beginning way back when we started up this journey that we wanted to be peaking at the right time and playing our best ball at the right time and I think we’re doing that.”

nmadhavan@tribtoday.com