GULFPORT, Miss.  – Another perfect day to start tournament play by the Nicholls State University softball team upped its record to 10-4 on the season as the Colonels defeated IPFW, 3-2, and Mississippi Valley State, 6-0, on Friday in the Mississippi Gulf Coast Classic.
 
Nicholls will have two late games on Saturday in the classic as they take on Memphis (5:30 p.m.) and Southern Miss (8 p.m.).
 
Game 1 - Nicholls 3, IPFW 2
 
With the game knotted at 2-all in the bottom of the seventh, Brooke Morris slapped a single to plate Danielle Phillips from second as the Colonels captured a 3-2 walkoff victory over IPFW.
 
Nicholls held a 2-0 lead over IPFW (2-9) after three innings, but the Mastodons used a triple and a double off Hannah Haydel in the fourth to even the score. Haydel lasted five innings, allowing two runs on five hits and struck out one.
 
Megan Landry (4-2) tossed two innings of shutout relief, setting up the Colonels' walkoff win in the seventh. Phillips reached on a one-out error and moved over to second on the play, and Morris singled on the first pitch to win the game for the Colonels.
 
Nicholls finished with eight hits in the win, led by a 2-for-3 outing by Amanda Gianelloni, who drove in Morris in the first inning on a single up the middle. Gianelloni then fueled another run in the third as she tripled and scored on an Alexis Huss double for the early 2-0 lead.
 
Game 2 – Nicholls 6, Mississippi Valley 0
 
The Colonels plated three runs in the fourth and fifth innings and it proved to be more than enough offense as Nicholls picked up a 6-0 victory over Mississippi Valley State.
 
Facing the Devilettes for the second time, Megan Landry (5-2) limited MVSU to two hits in six innings of work, after she tossed a five-inning no-hitter in her first matchup. Landry was nearly as unhittable as she was in the first matchup as she fanned a career-high 14 batters out of a possible 18 outs.
 
The game was scoreless through three, despite Nicholls recording a hit in each of the first three frames, but in the fourth, the Colonels used three hits to take a 3-0 lead. Danielle Phillips came through with a 2-run single with the bases loaded, and Brooke Morris drove in another run on an RBI groundout.
 
In the fifth, Nicholls doubled its lead after two errors led to three runs. Landry then put herself into trouble in the bottom half by walking the bases loaded, but got out of the jam with back-to-back strikeouts. She then allowed a one-out double in the six, but once again struck out the next two batters to keep MVSU scoreless.
 
Taylor Hastings pitched the seventh for the Colonels, issuing a pair of one-out walks before ending the game with two consecutive groundouts.
 
Alexis Huss paced the offense by going 3-for-4 at the plate, and Payton Gremillion and Haley Stevenson added two hits each.