The Alaska Little League Junior Softball State Tournament featured a double-dose of late-game drama Wednesday night at Nunaka Valley Park in Anchorage.<\/p>\n
Gastineau Channel Little League of Juneau, the District 2 champions<\/a>, and Nunaka City Little League of Anchorage, the District 1 champions, squared off in the second and (most of) the third game in their best-of-five game playoff series.<\/p>\n After Juneau’s late-game lead disappeared in a Game 2 loss — GCLL fell 10-9 after leading by three runs in the six — the capital city team was well on its way to victory in Game 3. Juneau led 13-2 in the fourth inning when the game was called off shortly after 11 p.m. due to a local curfew rule.<\/p>\n In addition to a one-hour delay to start the game, the second inning took more than a half hour to complete after Nunaka City protested one of Juneau’s runs.<\/p>\n Nunaka City appealed to the home plate umpire that one of Juneau’s players didn’t touch home plate after Peyton Carson hit a three-run home run. After a review of the play, the umpire determined the coach was correct, and that Riley Harp did not step on home plate.<\/p>\n The Juneau faction fired back though, saying the appeal wasn’t run according to the rule book.<\/p>\n “The whole thing was really confusing and ultimately the call stuck so the inning ended,” Juneau coach Nicole Adair said. <\/p>\n After resuming the game on Thursday afternoon, GCLL defeated Nunaka City 13-2. The two sides play again at 6 p.m. Thursday night.<\/p>\n “It’s really cool to see kids face some adversity and overcome it and stay strong,” Adair said.<\/p>\n Juneau, the District 2 <\/a>champions<\/a>, came within six outs of evening up the series at 1-1 with Nunaka City in the second game. However, Nunaka took a 10-9 lead in the sixth, Malamaisaua Matautia got out of a bases-loaded jam in the seventh to seal the win. Nunaka City won Game 1, 8-6.<\/p>\n The Junior Softball West Regional Tournament is San Bernardino, California from July 20-26. The Junior Softball World Series is in Portland, Oregon, from Aug. 7-14.<\/p>\n \u2022 Contact sports reporter Nolin Ainsworth at 523-2272 or nainsworth@juneauempire.com. Follow Empire Sports on Twitter at @akempiresports.<\/b><\/p>\n Juneau attempts to even the series. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":50507,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-50506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50506"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=50506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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