Mike Gegenheimer

Special for azcentral sports

BATON ROUGE, La. — Arizona State is always happy when Jennifer Soria swings the bat.

As the Sun Devils’ best hitter all season, she leads the team in home runs, hits and runs scored, which makes Saturday night a bit of an anomaly.

After playing 21 innings between two games at the Baton Rouge Regional of the NCAA softball tournament, including a 14-inning marathon against McNeese State, Soria was the hero the Sun Devils needed her to be, but it wasn’t for swinging the bat — it was because she didn’t.

Soria drew a walk while staring down a full count with two outs and the bases loaded to force a runner across and defeat McNeese State 3-2 in 14 innings.

It was the second walk off score of the day for Arizona State, and the Sun Devils survived to see another day.

“Any game can be your last game at this point,” Soria said. “Everyone was just giving it their all and fighting until the last inning, whether it was the 14th or the seventh.”

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It looked as if the game would end in the eighth when McNeese State’s Shanice Hagler hit an RBI single to give the Cowgirls a 2-1 lead.

But this time Soria let her swing do the talking, hitting a solo home run in the bottom half of the inning to tie the game.

The Sun Devils had their chance to end the game that inning, as Nikki Girard and Sashel Palacios followed up with back-to-back singles to knock pitcher Emily Vincent off her rhythm, but a quick pitching change by McNeese State to Jamie Allred helped quell the rally with no further damage.

“I had been struggling a little bit with (Vincent) and I was getting frustrated,” Soria said. “(Coach Robert Wagner) kind of saw the play before I did because I couldn’t slow my mind down, and he told me what to expect and I just had to bring it up there and execute.”

The Sun Devils' only other run Saturday night came when third baseman Taylor Becerra took a bases loaded walk from McNeese State starting pitcher Rachel Smith to give Arizona State a 1-0 lead in the second inning.

Becerra was the hero of the Sun Devils’ first game on Saturday, extending their season for a few more hours with a walk-off single against Long Island University-Brooklyn in the seventh inning to win 1-0 and eliminate the Blackbirds from the tournament.

But despite the freshman’s heroics, ASU’s first game of the day was mainly a contest to see which team’s pitcher would be the first to crack.

Sun Devils junior pitcher Kelsey Kessler bounced back from a disappointing outing on Friday to throw six innings of perfect softball before LIU-Brooklyn right fielder Whitney West led off the seventh inning with a single.

“That was today?” Kessler asked after throwing a total of 199 pitches between the two games. “We’re just trying to get wins at this point, and if that’s what I needed to do to win the game, then that’s what I needed to do.”

Between 14 and 2/3 innings pitched through both games, Kessler allowed two earned runs on 11 hits, almost all of which came in the second game, and struck out 11 batters.

Arizona State moves on to face host LSU in the regional finals for the second consecutive season.

The game is slated to start at 11 a.m. Arizona time, and if the Sun Devils win, a second game will be played 45 minutes after.

UA moving on to regional championship

Arizona is moving on to the Knoxville regional championship.

With a stellar performance from pitcher Danielle O'Toole, the Wildcats won against host Tennessee on Saturday afternoon 4-0. Coupled with Arizona's win against Ohio State earlier on Saturday, the Wildcats clinched a spot in Sunday's regional championship.

Now, the Wildcats will just wait to see who they will play. Tennessee will Ohio State game on Sunday afternoon, and then the winner of that will play Arizona and would have to beat the Wildcats twice to win the regional. UA will only need to win once on Sunday.

– Arizona Daily Star