The Mid-Prairie Golden Hawk baseball team dropped a crossover River Valley Conference contest Friday at Mount Mercy University to the Cascade Cougars 7-4. Cascade started quick with three runs in the first and two more in the second. Down 5-0, the Hawks got to work, scoring three in the third with Tatem Telfer coming away with an RBI hit, Brooks Weber, Cash Brown and Jason Heitman scoring runs and Heitman, Brooks Weber, Telfer and Brady Weber getting hits. Mid-Prairie put up one more in the fourth when Brown singled in Blake Swart to bring the Hawks within 5-4, but they would get no closer. The Cougars out hit the Golden Hawks 11-10 and drew three walks to Mid-Prairie’s two. Gentry Bontrager, Brown and Heitman had two hits each. Telfer and Brown each had an RBI. Bontrager and Landry Gingerich combined on the mound for 11 hits, four earned runs, three walks and seven strikeouts. Following the contest, head coach Kyle Mullet talked about his takeaways.

He said, “I’m so proud of our guys tonight, the way they approached things, especially Gentry (Bontrager). They (Cascade) really had their timing on him. It was a little scary there, we didn’t know if we were going to get him through three innings and we needed him to go the distance. Boy did he settle in! Defense settled in. Offensively, out of the gate, we put some hard hit balls in play and competed the whole game. For us to put up nine hits tonight was huge. Everybody got that first look then the second time around did a tremendous job. If we clean a few things up, that score looks a lot different!”

Each team is now 14-10 on the year.