Staff photo / Brian Yauger LaBrae Freshman Leah DeArmitt fires a pitch during the team’s 7-2 victory over Garfield on Friday.

LEAVITTSBURG — LaBrae rode an early scoring rush to a big league victory over Garfield on Friday, taking down the G-Men 7-2 in MVAC Gray Tier play.

Freshman Leah DeArmitt surrendered three hits while sitting six in the Viking victory.

“She just mixed it up,” LaBrae coach Dwayne Buck said. “She changes her speed to keep them off balance. They got two hits today, so we can deal with that all day long.”

After a hot start, stalling out offensively has been an issue a few times this season.

“It’s kind of been a problem we’ve had where we get out, we have a real hot start and then we cool off in the middle innings. Then we tend to finish strong, but we’ve been trying to get ourselves out of that,” Buck said. “It has cost us a couple of times, not finishing them early, so we’re working on that.

“We just need to try and keep that energy that we start the game with trying to keep it up. It seems like we get hot and then they just kind of relax, and I want them to stay focused and treat everything the same. Just execute.”

On the inverse, Garfield’s biggest issue has come from poor starts and digging themselves a hole.

Starting in a hole is never a good thing, and like how LaBrae aims to fix its late-game lulls, the G-Men are working on better starts.

“We don’t come in ready. They come in like low energy,” Garfield coach Tina Faulhaber said. “I don’t know if we’re not ready for the team to hit, or, like last time, they didn’t bunt as much so I don’t know if we expected their three big hitters to bunt. It’s been a long week.

“I think we just need to take our warmups a little bit more seriously. Just focus more and remind ourselves of innings like this, where as soon as (the umpire) says ‘Play ball’, we’ve got to be ready to play. Just kind of try to pump up the energy and cheer each other on and talk each other up. I think that’s got a lot to do with it.”

After that first inning however, the G-Men settled in. Juliana Genovese sat girls down, escaped 3-1 counts with strikeouts, and the hitters she didn’t take care of herself, her team backed her up.

Unfortunately for Garfield (7-5), that defensive success didn’t translate to the plate.

Until the seventh inning.

Taking advantage of a Viking error, the G-Men were able to bring two runners home, but DeArmitt closed the game out.

Garfield takes on Solon today at 11 a.m. in Solon.

The Vikings (13-4) kick off next week’s slate with a home-and-home with Crestview. While catching Champion in the league race is a tall task, they face the Flashes next week, and anything can happen.

“We need to finish strong,” Buck said. “We’ve got five league games next week, so our goal will be to, obviously, try to take care of it on Monday and Tuesday (against Crestview), and if we can hang with Champion, you never know. (A win would) give us both one loss in the league if we can come away with one.”

Start time on Monday is 5 p.m. at home.

Have an interesting story? Contact Brian Yauger by email at byauger@tribtoday.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @_brianyauger.