For the third consecutive year, the Scarborough Little League softball all-stars, aged 11 and 12, has fallen in regional play. The squad – which defeated Shaker Valley to win the Maine title and their berth in Bristol, Conn. – opened the tournament with huge wins over Essex, Vt., and Derry, N.H., before colliding with three teams who proved more than their match: Cranston, R.I., Charlton, Mass., and Robbinsville, N.J., which eliminated them in 2013 as well.

The Cranston loss – a 15-3 blindsiding on Tuesday, July 22 – was supposed to have served as “a wake-up call for the girls from Scarborough,” according to coach Chris Kelley. After three innings, Scarborough led 1-0, but Cranston then exploded, scoring three in the fourth to rattle the Mainers and 12 more in the fifth to tear them down. A late four-error streak contributed to Scarborough’s fall. Sydney Michelson went 1-2 in the game and crossed home twice.

Instead of a wake-up call, then, what the girls might’ve gotten was crippled confidence, because their game the following day, against Charlton, also found them on the receiving end of an overwhelming offensive battery. Until the third, the bout was another “see-saw battle,” says Kelley. Alas, his girls “left too many baserunners on” and committed a couple critical errors. So despite leading 4-2 after one, and only trailing by one, 5-4, after two, Scarborough gave up a big nine-run third to the lineup from Massachusetts.

They began to claw back in the fourth, adding two, and the fifth, adding two more, but couldn’t ultimately catch up, and lost 14-8. Bella Dickinson and Mia Kelley both went 2-4 at the plate, while Michelson scored three times and Madison Blanche twice.

“Some coaching decisions with bases loaded – attempts to get force outs at home – proved too much,” Kelley said. “If we’d gotten the outs at home, we would have looked like geniuses. We were close to making it happen, but after we didn’t get the force-out the first time, we should have just chipped away at the easy outs.”

On Thursday, the 2-2 Mainers entered crossover play, in which the two ongoing regional tournaments, representing the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, crossed paths, seeded fourth. Their first opponent, it turned out, was Robbinsville, N.J., the same incredible squad they’d run up against a year prior. And once again, the Jersey girls triumphed, holding Scarborough scoreless through four innings, while putting up 10 of their own to trigger the run-rule and end Maine’s season on a 12-4 record.

Dickinson, Blanche and Ava McDonald notched Scarborough’s three hits in the game.

“Well, the run is over,” Kelley said. “But we had a great experience in Bristol.”

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