After pulling out narrow wins earlier in the week against King’s Fork High School and Grassfield High School, the Nansemond River High School Lady Warriors absorbed an 11-1 mercy-rule blowout at the hands of host Western Branch High School on Friday.

“We had this a long time coming,” Nansemond River head coach Gabe Rogers said. “We had two wins where we were coming back. We’ve had a lot of innings where we’re not scoring, and we shouldn’t be doing that.”

On Tuesday, the Lady Warriors took an early lead and went scoreless for several innings before pulling out a dramatic, last second win. On Thursday, they did not score until the seventh inning to achieve a 3-2 win over Grassfield.

“You can’t just have that many innings where you’re not scoring runs, and we are, so it might be good for us,” Rogers said of Friday’s defeat. “I can tell you my confidence is not shattered. I’ve beat teams bad, and I’ve lost to teams bad. Today was just a bad loss. It is what it is. Hickory beat the crap out of us, and then we turned around and beat a really good Deep Creek team, so we’ll be fine.”

Rogers pinpointed a couple of areas that were problems on Friday.

“I preach don’t walk people, we can’t afford to make errors, and we walked people and we made errors, and that’s automatically a recipe for disaster,” he said.

The Lady Warriors allowed four walks and their coaches estimated the team had five or six errors.

“Four base on balls, even if it’s just five errors, that’s nine base runners that shouldn’t be on base,” Rogers said. “It’s very difficult to win when we do stuff like that.”

He also highlighted minor injuries and fatigue that may have begun to take a role after the team played three games in four days this week.

“They all have just nicks and bruises,” Rogers said. “(Sydney Glover’s) getting a little banged up, (KateLynn Hodgkiss’) a little banged up, Emily (Carson) gets banged up behind the plate, (Jessie Rogers’) banged up, that’s why Jessie didn’t play tonight. And we just have little fatigue injuries.”

“I told them, I said, ‘Just rest, heal up your injuries, and we’ll just move forward from here,’” he said.

Nansemond River (14-4, 12-4) hosts Oscar Smith High School on Tuesday.