Everett softball walked off by Garfield at state

Published 2:30 pm Friday, May 22, 2026

LACEY — There was no doubt in Braylon Yarwood’s mind.

Even with Everett softball down to its last out, trailing Garfield 4-2 in the top of the seventh in the second round of the 3A State Tournament at the Regional Athletic Complex on Friday, the senior third baseman felt confident that she would score both of her teammates on base to tie things up. Yarwood was robbed of what would have been a go-ahead, three-run homer in her previous at-bat in the fifth, squaring the ball on the first pitch and sending it to deep center only for it to die in the outfielder’s glove at the fence.

She was due.

With the game on her shoulders, Yarwood fouled off the first pitch she saw, then took the second to even the count at 1-1. On the third pitch, she squared it up again, this time finding a gap in center field to tie it 4-4 with a two-run double. Just as she envisioned.

“I just kept thinking, ‘I’m going to hit it. I’m going to hit,’” Yarwood said. “My teammate (junior Haylie Oyler) had just hit before me. I was like, ‘We’re up right now. We can totally get this done,’ and I just had faith in my team that we were going to be able to make it work.

“I just saw the ball and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there it is.’”

Everett had new life entering the bottom of the frame, but it was short-lived.

After an infield single put Garfield’s leadoff batter on first, sophomore Nina Breckenridge ripped a double to deep center field, delivering the walk-off RBI to give the No. 7 seed Bulldogs (16-8) a 5-4 win against the No. 10 seed Seagulls (16-11). Everett had an opportunity to make a play at the plate, but the throw home just missed the catcher to allow senior Joie Cunningham to reach home safely.

Yarwood went 1-for-4 with 2 RBI, while senior Anna Luscher and sophomore Kaitlyn Kelley each had two hits for the Seagulls. Luscher also struck out nine batters in the circle, allowing just two earned runs on five hits and three walks.

For Garfield, Cunningham went 2-for-4 with three runs scored, and senior Samantha Breckenridge struck out seven in a complete game, allowing nine hits, two walks and four earned runs.

Aside from the remaining consolation games, Friday effectively marked the end of a bounce-back season for a young Everett team, which made it all the way to the District 1 3A Championship game as the eight-seed and returned to state for the second time in three years after missing out in 2025. After getting no-hit by Sedro-Woolley in the title game on May 14, Millar expressed hope that the experience would help prepare the Seagulls for the higher level competition they would run into at state.

After rising to the occasion in the seventh against the Bulldogs, which has a real pedigree in this tournament following a runner-up finish last year and a fourth-place spot in 2024, Everett proved it was built for this tournament. It just wasn’t quite enough in the end.

“We’ve insanely done so much better from the beginning of the season to now,” Yarwood said. “We’ve really bonded as a team as well. We’ve all gotten a lot closer. We’re friends from the freshmen to seniors. … I think we wouldn’t be here without each other, and I think we really feed off of each other’s energy. I have high hopes for us, and the team going forward even when I’m gone.”

The Seagulls easily could have pulled away on multiple occasions, and even fell on the wrong side of a crucial no-call when Garfield took a 3-1 lead in the third. After coming up empty with loaded bases in the second, Everett opened the fifth with back-to-back hits that put runners on second and third with no outs. However, following two straight pop-ups over the plate and Yarwood’s near-homer that died at the fence, it came up empty again.

With an extra base hit here or there, the outcome could have been completely different.

“We just have to have quality at-bats, put the ball in play,” Millar said. “Or just get a good, hard ground ball there, or a deep fly ball, and we score a run or two and now we’re maybe (up) 2-0 or 3-0 out of the gate, then it definitely changes the complexion of the game.”

The Seagulls started out with the upper hand after Luscher hit a leadoff home run on just the third pitch of the game. After stranding the loaded bases in the second, she pitched a 1-2-3 third inning to keep the score at 1-0 before the Bulldogs pulled ahead.

Garfield got on the board after loading the bases in the bottom of the third, working a pair of full-count walks on top of a Cunningham single. Junior Sula Yogi-Adams grounded out to Luscher as senior Madeline Woodling scored from third to tie it 1-1.

With two outs, junior Kaitlyn Washington grounded a ball into the left side of the infield, and a Bulldogs base-runner’s path to third appeared to interfere with junior Mia Hoekendorf as she attempted to field the ball, which allowed two runners to make it home. Millar appealed to the umpires after both were called safe, and after a quick discussion, the umpires confirmed the runners scored to give Garfield a 3-1 lead. This came after a similar-looking play resulted in an out with Everett batting in the bottom of the first.

“It looked like (she) clearly made contact with the runner. It should have been interference. (The umpires) said they didn’t see it,” Millar said. “So yeah, that was a tough break. That would have been the third out of the inning, and that cost us two runs right there.

“But even with that being said, we had our opportunities to make a call like that not matter, and we didn’t capitalize.”

After the Seagulls squandered another opportunity with runners in scoring position in the fifth, the Bulldogs pushed it to 4-1 on sophomore Ella Howard’s RBI single up the middle with two outs in the bottom of the frame.

Finally in the seventh, Everett turned its contact into productive at-bats. Entering as a pinch-hitter, freshman Presley Eshelman led off the seventh with a bloop single to right, and even after Samantha Breckenridge struck out the next two batters, the Seagulls did what they needed to do. Hoekendorf smacked a ground-rule double to center to put runners on second and third, and junior Haylie Oyler cut it to 4-2 with an RBI single to center, advancing to second on the throw to set up Yarwood’s tying double.

“(Eshelman) had a hit and she was on base, and since then that started just like a (domino) effect,” Yarwood said. “It was just (we) really had a lot of confidence there, and I think that’s kind of what started, ‘Oh we can get back. We can make it.’”

With the walk-off loss, Everett missed out on the program’s first trip to the quarterfinals since 2016. The Seagulls was to face No. 18 seed Southridge in a loser-out consolation match later on Friday.

“The good thing playing this tournament ball, you see the best of the best,” Millar said. “Hopefully, we will continue to learn from it, and in the end, it’ll bring the best out of our team not only for the rest of this tournament, but going into next year.”

Sedro-Woolley 30, Shorewood 0 (5)

After picking up a 10-4 opening round win against No. 17 seed Enumclaw on Thursday, the No. 16 seed Stormrays (16-10) ran into a buzzsaw in the top seeded Cubs (22-2), who took a 2-0 lead in the first before stretching it to 10-0 through two and blitzing all the way to a 28-0 lead by the end of the third.

Shorewood had lost 14-0 to Sedro-Woolley in the District 1 3A semifinals on May 12, and the Cubs took it even further in the rematch.

Senior Kasandra Gonzalez and freshman McKenna Lewellen pitched a combined for 10 strikeouts in a no-hitter for Sedro-Woolley, with Shorewood senior Ellie Van Horn working a walk in the second inning to prevent a perfect game.

“Obviously they have a very good pitching staff that makes it hard to score runs,” Stormrays coach Paul Jensen said. “In the district tournament, they played three games and gave up one hit, so we knew what we were up against. We came in just talking about controlling what we could control: Trying to put the bat on the ball, trying to make defensive plays and see what happened.”

Jensen turned to two freshmen in the circle — Olivia Adams and Zoey Perreault — to give them valuable postseason experience with an eye towards the future. After clinching the program’s first state berth since 1999, Shorewood will look to turn this season into sustained success going forward.

In the meantime, the Stormrays face No. 9 seed Central Kitsap in the loser-out consolation bracket later on Friday.

“We know we could play better than we played,” Jensen said. “But that was a very solid team that would have taken a great effort to defeat. The scoreboard, at this point, all that meant was we just have to flush it and move on to the next game because we can control what we can control. We can’t control what they did.”