North Adams splits wooden-bat classic, tops South Point 7-6, falls to Portsmouth West 7-1

North Adams found enough pitching and timely contact to beat South Point 7-6 at Portsmouth West High School, then ran into a much steeper test when the host Senators handed the Green Devils a 7-1 loss in the second game of the Rocky Nelson Wooden Bat Classic.

Against South Point, Ryan Unger’s club jumped out fast and built a 6-1 lead before the Pointers made the seventh inning uncomfortable. North Adams pieced together the advantage with a hit by pitch, a groundout RBI and a bases-loaded walk, then added key hits from Maverick Winkler and Hunton Shiveley to stay in front. Carsyn Raines was the steady hand on the mound, working five innings and striking out seven to earn the win. When South Point pushed late, Winkler came out of the bullpen and finished the final inning to protect the 7-6 victory.

The second game showed the other side of the Green Devils’ spring. North Adams scored first, but Portsmouth West settled in and pulled away, limiting the Devils to four hits in the 7-1 loss. In a doubleheader built around wooden bats rather than the aluminum North Adams uses most of the season, offense was harder to sustain, and the Devils could not keep pressure on the Senators after the opening frame.

The split left North Adams at 7-11 overall, a record that mirrors much of its season so far: capable of beating quality opponents, but still too uneven to put together a long stretch of clean baseball. Earlier this spring, the Devils were 3-5 through eight games and had already shown the same win-big-or-lose-big pattern that surfaced again in Portsmouth. That volatility mattered on Saturday because it separated a promising first game from a lopsided second one.

The result also fit the larger backdrop of the event. Portsmouth West has hosted the Rocky Nelson Wooden Bat Classic before and won it in 2023, so North Adams entered a setting where the host program has long been comfortable. For the Green Devils, the takeaway was less about one good inning or one tough inning than about identity: Raines and Winkler gave them a dependable pitching backbone against South Point, but the four-hit showing against Portsmouth West exposed how thin the lineup can look when the bats go quiet. As North Adams heads back into nonconference and conference play, the challenge is clear, find more consistent offense and carry the first-game resilience into the rest of the season.