The Cranston West softball team has played fairly well for all but two innings of the young season.

Those two innings, though, have sent the Falcons to an 0-2 start.

Against Tolman last Tuesday, West lost a four-run lead in the seventh inning on its way to a 7-6, eight-inning loss.

Then on Friday, the Falcons took an early lead only to give up 10 runs in the third inning to Smithfield. They tried to battle back, but it was too much to overcome in an eventual 14-7 defeat.

West has given up 21 runs on the year, and 14 of them have come in a pair of innings.

In the third inning against Smithfield, West hit a batter, handed out two walks and committed three errors. They didn’t make another error the rest of the game, but the damage was done.

“The inning from hell, I guess,” said West head coach Jeff Smith. “Nothing went our way.”

Heading into that inning, the Falcons led 1-0 thanks to a Blake Jackman RBI groundout in the first inning, scoring Kristen Traficante. On the mound, West pitcher Alexis Plumley had battled out of jams in the first and second innings, keeping the Sentinels scoreless.

She couldn’t repeat that feat in the third inning.

Smithfield sent 15 batters to the plate and picked up six hits. The first run scored on an error by Plumley, who threw the ball high to home while trying to get the second out of the inning on a chopper back to the mound with the bases loaded.

That opened the floodgates. Analise England followed with a two-run single, and two batters later a high throw from Gianna Hathaway at shortstop to first base allowed a fourth run to come in.

Plumley issued a bases-loaded walk to Juliana Romeo, then gave up singles to Megan Long and England, making the score 8-1.

“You can’t let them have those innings, giving them six outs,” Smith said. “You can’t win like that.”

West went to the bullpen for Brianna Caputo, but she promptly allowed runs on consecutive wild pitches. The Falcons got out of the inning thanks to a diving stop by Traficante at second base with the bases loaded, but they found themselves trailing by nine runs.

To its credit, West didn’t throw in the towel. It came back with three runs in the fourth on a two-run double by Lauren Salisbury and an RBI single by Cassie Manni. After giving up one more run in the fourth to Smithfield, the Falcons narrowed the gap even more with three more runs in the fifth to get within 11-7. Hathaway laced an RBI double and Salisbury drove in two more with a single up the middle.

Still, they couldn’t get any closer. Ana Viccione hit into an inning-ending double play in the fifth, and then West stranded a base runner in both the sixth and seventh innings.

“The kids came back,” Smith said. “We don’t quit on anything. It was a chance for us to get a hit here, get a hit there, get them down and maybe come all the way back. But it just didn’t work today.”

Smithfield added to its lead in the sixth inning against West’s third pitcher of the day, Camryn Ricci. Abbigael Cook brought in a run with a single and Alyssa Beaton brought in two more with a single of her own.

With Ricci as the team’s third pitcher of the day, West was in an unfamiliar spot. The last three years, it has leaned almost exclusively on Kelly McDonough, who is now graduated.

At this point in the season, the Falcons have been using all three pitchers and are still trying to figure out their best options on the mound.

“We’re still sorting that out,” Smith said. “This hasn’t been fair to any one of the three of them, with how the weather has been for the tryout, per se. It’s something that we’re hoping will resolve itself quickly.”

West finished the day with 10 hits. Jules Hathaway had three of them, while Gianna Hathaway, Manni and Salisbury each had two. The other came from Menard. The Falcons offense has been a bright spot thus far, as it had 13 hits in the first game.

At 0-2, West is currently one of seven teams in Division I without a victory, but Smith isn’t ready to panic. The Falcons were scheduled to host Mount on Tuesday – with results unavailable at press time – and then travel to Chariho for a Friday game at 4 p.m.

The weather hasn’t helped an inexperienced group get its footing just yet, but West is still confident that once it warms up and its group has a little more varsity experience, that those big innings – and the losses that came with them – will be avoided.

“We’ve didn’t have too many mental errors, but we did do a couple of things that we could be working on,” Smith said. “The weather didn’t help. A lot of first-time players in the varsity game right now.”