State Semifinal Recaps: Lake Travis pulls away from Summer Creek to reach 6A, D1 title game; Dripping Springs stays alive against Memorial

Lake Travis punched its ticket to the 6A, Division 1 state championship game Friday night while Dripping Springs kept its 6A, Division 2 hopes alive.

The Cavaliers used a 7-run 6^th inning to pull away from Humble Summer Creek and sweep the 6A, Division 1 semifinal series to reach the state championship game for the first time. Lake Travis scored the game’s final 9 runs in a 9-2 win. Dripping Springs overcame an early 2-0 deficit and held on to defeat Houston Memorial 3-2 to force a winner-take-all Game 3 tomorrow.

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Lake Travis 9, Summer Creek 2 (LT wins series 2-0)

After pitching a complete game and contributing 3 RBI and 2 hits, C.J. Hansford had a message for his jubilant teammates as they celebrated qualifying for next Saturday’s state championship game at Dell Diamond.

“Enjoy the weekend,” Hansford said. “We’ve got practice on Monday!”

After cruising to a 13-0, 5-inning win in Thursday’s opener that included 8 first-inning runs, the Cavaliers knew Summer Creek wouldn’t go quietly into the offseason. Trevyn Turner, a Texas State signee, took the ball and promptly held Lake Travis scoreless for the first 3 innings.

“We talked about it all day,” Lake Travis coach Ryan Rogers said. “He is their number 1, and we knew he was going to be good.”

Things got more interesting when the Bulldogs took a 2-0 lead off Hansford in the bottom of the 3^rd. Jaidenn Garcia singled and scored on Bryce Hudson’s triple, and Hudson came home on Hansford’s wild pitch.

After taking a moment in the bullpen to calm himself down – “Honestly, I was very upset and doing my best not to show it,” Hansford said – he quickly redeemed himself. With 2 outs in the 4^th, he came to the plate with the bases loaded and sliced a game-tying single to left.

The game was still tied – and tense - in the bottom of the 5^th when Summer Creek loaded the bases off Hansford with just one out. Rogers credited catcher Yanu Molina for talking to Hansford during a time-out in the inning.

“They kind of regrouped,” Rogers said. “It was a really good reset. For me, that goes back to all the work we’ve done on the mental game. That’s what you have to do in these moments. You step back, take a deep breath, reset, and get back to just competing and winning pitches.”

There was a little more to it than the mental reset.

“Something was off,” Hansford admitted after the game. “These are the moments that we work on. I mean, you have to make an adjustment. You have to go out there and do it, and it doesn’t have to be pretty. What matters is you get out of it.”

Hansford couldn’t be 100% positive that his arm slot was off, but he felt it might be, so he changed it after Caleb Alexander became the third straight Bulldog to reach in the inning.

“I just wasn’t comfortable, and something didn’t feel right,” Hansford said. “I was shanking a lot of pitches. There was a little change in my arm slot. I don’t even know if it was actually changing, but I just thought something different, and it worked. I found it, and then I just kept rolling.”

He got Rory Martinez to hit a grounder to first base that Ethan Schlotterback gobbled up and threw home for a force out, and then Brian Price rolled a grounder at the second base bag that James Tudor handled easily to get out of the jam.

Having dodged a bullet, the Cavaliers took control. They loaded the bases with 1 out in the 6^th and stretched Turner to his 110-pitch limit. Once he left the game, the floodgates opened. With the bases loaded, the new pitcher’s first pitch hit Hansford in the shoulder, forcing in a run and giving the Cavaliers a 3-2 lead.

“I was more than happy to wear that one,” Hansford said.

Nelson Molina followed with a sacrifice fly, and after Schlotterback walked, Yanu Molina and Elliot Su followed with 2-run singles to break it open.

“We had fought so hard to get to that point, so to finally get a couple of big hits….” Rogers said. “During this playoff run, the big hit has kind of eluded us at times, so to get the big hits with Su and Yanu to give us more separation, that was huge. At that point, we started feeling like this might really happen.”

The pitcher felt it too, and he rode the wave through the final 2 innings.

“Oh, it was nice,” Hansford said of the big inning. “I needed a good break there, and it was nice having a little bit of pressure relief, but I knew the game was not over. We had to put our foot on the gas.”

He did. Though he never recorded a 1-2-3 inning, Hansford got through the last 2 innings, allowing just 1 runner in each. When Nolan Atkins settled under a fly ball and squeezed it for the final out, the Cavaliers streamed out of their dugout in a wild celebration.

“This is amazing,” Cooper Webb said one night after hurling a 1-hit shutout in the opener. “We’re just a band of brothers, and I’m glad we’re going to go down in immortality.”

Dripping Springs 3, Houston Memorial 2 (series tied 1-1)

Nixon Badilla struck Houston Memorial’s Jake Earnest out looking with the bases loaded to save the season and put Dripping Springs into a deciding game 3 on Saturday afternoon.

After the Mustangs scored twice in the first inning off Blake Cox, the Tigers’ ace shut them out the rest of the way. He worked into the 7^th inning before reaching his pitch count limit as Memorial mounted a final threat, putting runners on the corners with 2 outs. After Evan Mauritzen coaxed a walk, Badilla bounced back to strike out Earnest to end the game.

The Tigers played small ball to come from behind. Jason Steele delivered a sacrifice bunt that put Jake Pardue in position to score on Cruz McBride’s single, and Steele beat out a grounder that allowed Cade Sanders to score the tying run in the 5^th before Breydan Madeley’s 2-out single brought home Sam Branyon with what became the winning run.

The loss was Memorial’s first playoff loss and put an end to a 23-game winning streak.

The Tigers and Mustangs play their deciding game at 1 pm. The winner faces the Flower Mound Marcus-Tomball winner. The teams split the first 2 games of the series. The game 1 loss was Tomball’s first on the season.