Sentinel photo by BOB HOCKENBROCK Mifflin County's 2026 Class Valedictorian Ava Baker rounds third base after hitting a home run to left field.

LEWISTOWN — The Mifflin County softball team got off to a bad start in their 10-4 loss Thursday against Cedar Cliff, going down 5-0 in the first inning.

Piper Specht started in the circle for the Huskies. She walked the first three batters of the game and later gave up four hits that resulted in five first-inning runs. Specht would exit the game after getting hurt after the first inning. “We got to throw strikes,” Mifflin County coach Craig Weston said. “We got in a hole, and she got hurt, which doesn’t help things at all. We have to have the mentality that you just got to keep grinding at it.”

The Huskies brought in Addisyn Velez to pitch the rest of the game. She pitched well for five innings not allowing any runs and only two hits. Velez also was 3-for-4 with an RBI at the plate.

“Addie came in and threw well,” Weston said. “When she can throw all of her pitches she is effective.”

After the first inning, the Huskies looked like they were in control of the game. With Velez shutting down the Colts’ offense, Mifflin County scored one in the second and Ava Baker hit a solo home run in the third, they added another run in the sixth to make the score 5-3. Still, they lacked any big inning that would have tied the game or given them the lead.

“We had some opportunities with runners on,” Weston said. “We tried to go a little small ball, get some bunts, move around, it worked sometimes, other times it didn’t. We were struggling to get that big hit and string hits together.”

Finally, in the seventh inning, the Colts started to break the game wide open with five more runs put on the board to increase the lead to 10-3. Velez hit an RBI single to make it 10-4 but that was it for the Huskies on the day.

“Hit the ball hard sometimes, made some plays,” Weston said. “We did a lot of things that didn’t show up as errors, made some baserunning mistakes and things like that. We gotta clean up the free passes, and we gotta clean up the mental mistakes.”

Mifflin County (3-11) will be at Mechanicsburg at 4:15 p.m. on Monday.