The young Nansemond-Suffolk Academy softball team continued to show improvement on Friday, but the visitors from Southampton Academy won the hitting battle.

A Lady Raiders grand slam home run in the first inning put the Lady Saints in trouble early. While they cut the deficit in half in the second, they ultimately could not over overcome it, falling 7-3.

NSA head coach Kim Aston said that an event at the beginning like the grand slam “sort of takes the wind out of your sails. So, slowly, we have to get back into it. And we don’t have a power team, so we’ve got to try to not dig ourselves a hole like that to get out of.”

She did note that, despite the early deficit, her team was still able to get runners on base.

Senior Katelyn McCracken and freshman Brooklyn Carr each went 2-for-3 for the game, junior Macy Mears and McCracken both scored runs and sophomore Madi Glynn had an RBI triple in the fifth inning.

“I just saw it, and I was like, ‘Ooh, I like this pitch,’” Glynn said of the triple. “So, I just hit it. I liked it a lot.”

Glynn personified the general mood after the game, which was far from dour because of the positive things that the Lady Saints were still able to accomplish.

“I think we definitely did well,” Glynn said. “We have some improvements to make, but we can do it. We’re getting used to working well together.”

The Lady Saints even got some offense from some of its youngest players. As NSA took its last shot at the win in the bottom of the seventh, it was eighth-grader Lindsay Knierbein who singled first to get the ball rolling. Earlier in the game, fellow eighth-grader Logan Harrell scored.

Aston was also pleased with NSA’s defense, citing only two fluke-type plays that caused some issues.

“One where Devin (Coyne) went to snag one and it ricocheted off her glove and then went behind Macy, which that’s just going to happen, and then the same thing for Brooklyn at first, but other than that, we made pretty much all the plays that we had, they just hit the ball better than we did.”

Coyne, who still managed 12 strikeouts, agreed, while expressing confidence that the team can work to produce more hits in the future.

“I think that’s definitely something we’re going to work on next week, but I think you can still see improvements from where we started to now,” she said.

One area where Coyne felt the team excelled was on-field communication. Often, this refers to communication that facilitates good execution, but Coyne was talking about teammates encouraging one another in the face of less than ideal circumstances.

“Like, even when I made a defensive mistake, Macy, our shortstop, came to me and was like, ‘It’s fine. You’re good. Just keep pitching.’ And I think that’s something that we’ve really worked on, and I love that a lot.”

Nansemond-Suffolk (4-3, 2-0) will play at home again on Tuesday against Bishop Sullivan Catholic High School.