The Arizona Wildcats needed to win one game on Sunday to advance to regionals. They couldn’t do it.
Arizona
Road to the WCWS: Arizona can’t defend the long ball, Duke wins Durham Regional
Next time someone says that balls fly out of Hillenbrand because of the “desert air,” point to the home runs in more humid, low-lying areas around the country. Like Durham, NC, where one Duke home run after another put a nail in the Wildcats’ season on Sunday by scores of 8-6 and 9-4.
Duke hit four home runs in the early game. The Blue Devils returned to hit four more in the late game. Durham is at 404 feet above sea level and was supposed to have humidity between 45 and 70 percent on Sunday. So much for the lazy broadcasters’ take of “altitude and dry air.”
There are three parts of a game. Both Duke and Arizona have had their difficulties with pitching. Both are very good offensively. So, defense can make the difference. Both teams made crucial errors in the opener, but Arizona’s turned out to be the deciding one. The officials also made some interesting calls that ended up having huge impacts in the game.
A critical obstruction call was not made in the bottom of the first that would have put runners on the corners with one out. Arizona chose not to challenge, and the inning ended with Duke leading 1-0.
The lack of the challenge evened out an earlier missed call when Sereniti Trice was out of the box but it went unseen. While out of the box isn’t open to challenge, obstruction is. Regardless, missed calls affected both teams in the opening inning and it wasn’t the last time.
A bigger missed obstruction call came in the second. Duke threw the ball away as Regan Shockey got to first, and she took off for second. In the interim, a run scored for the Wildcats.
Centerfielder D’Auna Jennings came in to cover second base, but completely blocked it. As Shockey tried to slide in, Jennings’ knee hit her shoulder. Jennings also lost the ball. Yet, Shockey was called out on the play.
Arizona’s baserunner on third took off when the ball came loose and crossed home plate. A score of 3-1 went up on the ESPN score bug. That’s when the challenges started.
Duke challenged that Shockey was out at first. That was obviously a futile challenge even when looking at the TV replay. The safe call was upheld.
Arizona challenged obstruction at second base. That call of out was overturned and obstruction called. Not only did Jennings slow Shockey down, but she literally left the Arizona centerfielder clutching her shoulder in pain due to contact. It was an easy call.
After that, Duke challenged again. This time, they said Arizona’s second run shouldn’t have scored because it didn’t cross home until after the second base umpire signaled Shockey out. The officials sent the baserunner back to third and took an Arizona run off the board. A 3-1 game became 2-1 in Arizona’s favor.
Arizona likely caught a break that got that run in the third, though. Tayler Biehl was hit on the finger by a pitch, but it looked like it happened when she was swinging. It was called a foul ball. Arizona challenged the foul ball ruling and it was overturned. Biehl took first on a HBP to put two on with no one out.
Biehl came around to score, putting Arizona up 4-3 after three innings.
The obstruction and contact with Shockey in the second had a bigger impact than one play or a couple of runs. Arizona’s centerfielder stayed in the game at the time, but she was obviously in pain. Her next at-bat was taken by Emma Kavanagh, who drew a leadoff walk in the fourth. Shockey then went in to run.
The fourth was the start of the defensive drama. Kavanagh’s walk was followed by a hit-by-pitch that put Trice on base.
Arizona slugger Sydney Stewart continued to press. She has struggled this postseason, chasing pitches that are obviously out of her “plan” and not taking walks as consistently when the pitcher doesn’t throw what she’s looking for. Her foul-out and Biehl’s strikeout left Shockey and Trice standing on first and second.
It looked even more dire when Grace Jenkins popped up onto the infield. What should have been a routine catch for Duke shortstop Jessica Oakland simply went off the end of her glove. While the ACC Network commentators kept talking about the sun, it was the exact location Biehl had been playing without sunglasses or a visor. It looked like Oakland simply let the moment get to her.
It was a big moment. Two runs scored and Jenkins motored into second base. Arizona tied the game at six runs apiece, but that’s all the Wildcats could get. They didn’t score again.
Biehl is an amazing shortstop who gets to balls that many others would not. She’s a former Pac-12 Defensive Player of the Year. She’s also prone to trying to make the spectacular play and having it go awry. That tendency hurt Arizona in the top of the sixth.
Freshman righthander Rylie Holder walked the first batter in the sixth, but she followed that with two quick outs. The third out proved elusive.
A double put runners on the corners with two outs. Aminah Vega then singled up the middle. Biehl stopped the ball just behind second base and tried to throw to first. It was obvious that the ball was never going to catch Vega. It not only wasn’t there in time, but it went sailing into foul territory. A second run scored, giving Duke an 8-6 lead.
Arizona made nothing out of its final six outs, although Shockey showed the Wildcat faithful some hope by reaching on a bunt single in her final at-bat. How much her shoulder is hindering her could be important in the next game.
Arizona used all three of its pitchers.
Errors at critical times were big in the late game, too. Duke scored its first run after a throwing error by Sniffen allowed Duke leadoff hitter Jennings to take an extra base to start the game. She moved to third on a fielder’s choice that had Sniffen fail to get a tag down at third. That wasn’t an official error, but it was one of the “miscues” that are just as damaging.
From there, a run scored on a sacrifice fly. Adams got out of it with only one run despite another error by her defense in the inning.
Once again, Arizona showed that blaming the desert environment for giving up home runs is an easy explanation for broadcasters and perhaps those who want to sell the line to pitchers when going up against Arizona on the recruiting trail.
Duke put up its second run off a solo shot to lead off the second inning. Two different Blue Devils had two-run shots in the fourth.
The four runs in the bottom of the fourth were especially difficult for the Wildcats. They had just cut Duke’s lead to one on RBI singles by Emma Kavanagh and Shockey.
Even worse, the first home run knocked Shockey from the game. That outcome was so close to happening in the first game when Jennings’ obstruction led to a collision at second base. This time, there was no way for Shockey to come back from it.
The Big 12 co-Defensive Player of the Year showed that it’s not just about skill but about heart. She did everything she could for her team, running towards the wall, timing her jump perfectly, and getting the ball in her glove. It looked like a tremendous out.
Then, Shockey collided with the outfield wall. First, it was her shoulder, then it was her face.
Shockey dropped the ball and fell to the ground with her face forward. The trainers and coaching staff huddled around her for an extended period, then walked with her back to the dugout. Shockey was holding her nose as if it was bleeding or broken.
The second two-run homer really put the Wildcats’ back against the wall. Duke was up 7-2 with only three more offensive innings to go for Arizona. That also meant three more offensive innings for the Blue Devils, and neither Arizona’s pitching nor its defense had been up to that task.
The loss of Shockey made a big impact on everything Arizona does. She was 2-for-3 with an RBI in both games on top of being the center of the outfield defense.
Arizona had to move Kiki Escobar to left field and move Addison Duke to center. Escobar started at first base, so Kez Lucas took over there. That also made Lucas the leadoff hitter in Arizona’s lineup.
The Wildcats cut the Duke lead to three runs in the fifth. The sixth would have presented a prime opportunity to cut further into that lead. Shockey should have been leading off the inning. Instead, the freshman first baseman who has been scuffling at the plate was in her place. Lucas got into a 2-1 count then swung at two pitches out of the zone.
Both Trice and Stewart went down without much trouble, as well. The 1-2-3 inning was the last thing Arizona needed.
Jenae Berry had her usual outings in both games. She threw a strong inning or so, but then the opposing offense caught up to her. The same was the case for Holder earlier in the contest.
Adams started the game and was brought back in during the bottom of the sixth to finish her career on the field. She surrendered the final Duke home run of the day.
The Arizona offense went down quietly, going 1-2-3 in the top of the seventh.
The game ends Arizona’s season at 37-18. With Biehl, Stewart, Jenkins, Adams, Escobar, and reserve Camilla Zepeda all completing their eligibility, next year will be another round of new faces trying to break through. With the portal opening soon, the Arizona faithful will also have to wait and see whether money, playing time, and more attention in bigger leagues lure away some of those they’ve come to love.
Arizona biologists relocate beavers to help restore wetlands
Arizona Game and Fish biologists are moving beavers from locations where they can be a nuisance to areas where they can contribute to conservation.
Laura Roche understands the imperative of curbing carbon emissions to prevent climate change from supercharging wildfires to “megafire” status. But she’s also aware that such steps won’t solve the problem right away, even if the entire world got their act together on addressing climate change this instant.
“People get tired” just talking about reducing emissions, she said. Even as smoke lingers in the air from the Pocket Megafire that was burning less than 10 miles away, she knows it won’t be a helpful conversation. “But there are other things that can definitely improve the situation,” she added.
Roche, a Cottonwood resident who works in Sedona, has one suggestion in mind: reintroducing beavers.
Beavers are North America’s largest rodents, with a flair for dam building. Their structures create strings of ponds and vital belts of lush vegetation, which can help prevent and mitigate fires in the region, simply because beavers help wetlands stay wet.
Community interest in beavers is stirring among Sedona residents and workers, who have watched warily in recent weeks as the Pocket Fire raged. They’re circulating YouTube videos about the power of these humble animals to terraform landscapes and reduce fire risk in a fire-prone region.
As of July 15, the Pocket Fire has burned 27,400 acres and is 83% contained.
Roche herself has been sharing the science of beavers with government officials in forest planning meetings, customers, customers and friends across the political spectrum.
“I’ve had nothing but positive support for the idea,” she said.
The science seems to check out. Emily Fairfax is a beaver scientist at the University of Minnesota, and also a beaver evangelist.
“You cannot restore streams that were originally made by beavers and shaped by beavers —without also bringing back the beavers,” she said.
How beavers help mitigate wildfires
Beavers are slow creatures that sorely lack in the physical department — but make up for it with their brilliant minds. They build dams to create deep pools, and there they build island dens to deter land predators. They also construct a network of canals along rivers to facilitate forage without leaving the safety of the water. A single beaver family can service a mile-long strip of wetland.
“It’s incredible how large scale their engineering is,” Fairfax said. There’s a joke among her peers about these crafty animals: “If you have a problem, there’s a beaver for that.”
With a dam in the way, surface water, such as storm runoff, has time to seep into the ground, recharging groundwater in the process. The retained moisture encourages plant growth, especially crucial in times of drought. Studies have shown that beaver-managed streams have more abundant vegetation than a landscape without.
Beavers can thrive in all kinds of riparian ecosystems, including drylands. There, the rodents seek out groundwater springs and excavate their ponds to expand storage capacity.
Beaver families have been observed to frolic in the concrete hearts of California’s San Jose, Portland, Denver and even in metro Phoenix. As long as reeds and trees are present as a food source, beavers can make it work, using rocks, trash and whatever they can find as construction material.
Fairfax has found that beaver wetlands are more fire- and drought-resilient than any other kind of riparian zone bereft of beavers. That’s because beavers work incessantly to maintain their dams and ponds.
“It’s life or death for the beaver to have that wetland,” she said. “So every moment of the beaver’s day, it’s like, how do I make sure this place stays wet?”
During a wildfire, the footprint of beavers makes a difference. It’s harder for lightning struck fires to spread on beaver-managed wetlands, as green vegetation is much less fire-prone. The network of rivers and beaver-made canals can act as a fire break to slow the progression of wildfire.
The wet pockets of beaver habitat also provide refuge for animals fleeing from fires. In 2021, the Beckwourth megafire scorched more than 105,000 acres north of California’s Lake Tahoe but spared a web of lush riparian corridors on the floodplain — sites where beavers had dammed and dug and developed before the blaze hit.
Will beaver reintroduction work?
Beavers ruled North America for 7.5 million years, in numbers up to 200 million strong. Up to a billion beaver dams peppered the landscape. Pretty much every river on the continent had resident beavers, except for predator-plied places such as the Everglades, where there are alligators.
Fur trapping in the 1820s nearly caused beavers to go extinct. Today, only 10% of their historic population are found in waterways.
In Arizona, beavers are still widely distributed across the state, but in scant numbers. Reintroduction programs have helped sustain their populations, though their abundance is still far from their heyday.
Along the San Pedro River, also historically called Beaver River, reside an estimated 38 beavers. Arizona Game and Fish Department experts have been relocating beavers here since 1999. But the San Pedro’s beaver count is still declining, likely due to drought that has strained water levels, drying up their moated homes and suppressing cottonwood regeneration.
In the age of drought and megafires, Fairfax thinks beavers should be part of government agencies’ tools for managing fires. One rainy season is all it takes for reintroduced beavers to bring fire suppression and mitigation effects into their new home.
Can beavers make a dent on Arizona’s fire-prone landscape? Potentially, said Northern Arizona University community ecologist Stefan Sommer, especially along the riparian corridors where they den. But these strips make up just 0.5% of Arizona’s diverse landscapes. Moreover, 90% of the state’s surface waters have been wrangled into pipes and concrete canals, which are far from the ideal habitat of beavers.
But Sommer says beavers have the greatest promise for reducing flood risk in burn scars. Beaver dams and the riparian vegetation around them can act as sponges to hold back runoff after heavy rains.
Post-fire or no, other flood-frequent areas have already benefited from beavers. The Greenford Tube station in West London used to flood after every storm. But since beavers built a dam upstream three years ago, flooding no longer occurs.
Beavers’ dam-building bent isn’t broadly beloved. The industrious architects often plug up culverts, which can flood human infrastructure nearby.
As nature’s engineers, beavers bend rivers to their will, not unlike humans. For this reason, beavers are still considered nuisance animals. Beaver presence can interfere with the well-laid plans and long-term goals of human engineers who too want to work rivers to their own vision.
For all the benefits of bringing back beavers, reintroduction isn’t straightforward either. Beavers need to be moved with their entire family, as estranged individuals can die from depression.
The antics of beavers have garnered them fans — they’re known to be playful and prone to getting the zoomies. But their personalities need to be managed to prevent human habituation, Fairfax said. Beavers easily form bonds with humans, which complicates reintroduction success.
Ideally, work must be done in advance to make sure reintroduced beavers have all the resources they need to thrive. The process of planting willow and cottonwoods, the favorite snacks of beavers, can take years before denuded rivers become conducive enough for beavers to move in. Constructing analog dams helps beavers settle in, too, as it tricks them into thinking that other beavers have been there before.
Arizona’s translocation programs are geared toward removal from areas of human-animal conflict. According to the Arizona Game and Fish Department, none of these projects and any future ones are specifically intended for fire mitigation, which the agency considers a secondary benefit.
“We do not utilize beavers … as our federal and state foresters have more effective tools in their toolbelt for management of the forested woodlands of Arizona,” wrote Shawn Lowery, the agency’s supervisor of habitat restoration and mitigation, in an email.
With the double whammy of wildfires and drought around the West, the movement to reinstate the beaver onto rivers is growing. In the southern Sierras in California, the Tule River Tribe has been leading the efforts of returning beavers to their reservation to help retain water. In Nevada and Utah, restored beavers have fashioned lush oases in the middle of the desert.
Beavers aren’t a silver bullet to the West’s fire and water woes, and it’s possible their vast impact of the landscape might not be enough to turn the tide against climate-change-fueled disasters, Sommer said.
Nevertheless, beaver reintroduction is pretty low-risk compared to the destructive scale of natural hazards that humans contend with.
“Let (beavers) do their thing, and if it works, great,” Fairfax said. “If it doesn’t, oh well, now you have biodiversity, carbon sequestration and all the other benefits.”
Back in Sedona, Rowe has been a long-time advocate for repopulating beavers in the watershed, though it still hasn’t translated into concrete action from government officials. Rowe hopes that the recent Pocket Fire will finally persuade land managers to reconsider, before the next wildfire arrives.
Shi En Kim covers environmental issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to shien.kim@arizonarepublic.com.
Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.
Follow The Republic environmental reporting team at environment.azcentral.com and @azcenvironment on Facebook and Instagram.
Stunning places every Arizonan should visit at least once
From the Grand Canyon to Sedona’s red rocks to dramatic views of Havasupai Falls, here are some must-see places every Arizonan should check out.
Arizona is always making headlines for its breathtaking scenery, top travel destinations and highly ranked cities. Now, another Arizona gem is earning national recognition, with this famous city ranking No. 14 on Y Travel’s list of the 23 small towns in the USA to visit.
Y Travel, also known as Y Travel Blog, is an independent travel publication. The site has built a reputation for publishing firsthand destination guides, road-trip itineraries and family travel advice based on places the couple behind it has personally visited.
The ranking celebrates small towns that offer memorable travel experiences. According to Y Travel, the towns were selected based on their unique character, scenic beauty, walkable downtowns, local culture, history, outdoor recreation, food and the authentic experiences they provide to visitors rather than simply their popularity.
Here’s which city ranked top in Arizona.
Sedona named a small town to visit by Y Travel
Coming in at No. 14, Sedona stood out for its colorful blend of desert landscape, luxury resorts and spas, red rock formations, Bell Rock and Cathedral Rock
The website mentioned how the city has natural vortices and 300+ miles of hiking and biking trails nearby, with lots of outdoor activities to explore.
Got a story you want to share? Reach out at Tiffany.Acosta@gannett.com. Follow @tiffsario on Instagram.
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