WEBSTER CITY – Winners of five consecutive games and four in a row inside the North Central Conference, the Webster City softball team stepped onto the dirt at Lynx Field Monday night still in control of its own destiny in relation to the league championship.

Seven innings full of missed opportunities and frustrations later, WCHS found its title hopes on life support.

Seemingly a fraction of a second slow at the plate all night, the Lynx watched Algona strike early and again late en route to a 6-2 upset win, just its third over a NCC opponent this summer.

WCHS (12-15, 9-3 NCC) stranded eight runners on the base paths, seven of them in scoring position. The Lynx put a runner on third in the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth innings and yet came up empty on all five occasions.

“We’ve got to do a better job of executing when we’ve got girls on base,” WCHS head coach Jess Howard said. “We got girls in scoring position just about every inning and weren’t able to bring them in. We’ve got to be focused at the plate and attacking pitches right away.”

Algona’s performance was a nicely wrapped gift for sixth-ranked (Class 3A) Humboldt (23-5, 11-1 NCC), which now owns a two-game lead on the Lynx with two games remaining. Howard isn’t ready to say her team is out of the hunt for the hardware, but she knows the power is now in the hands of the Wildcats.

“Humboldt still has a few conference games left and they control their own destiny,” she said. “We just have to win out and see what happens after that.”

Eighth-grader Kameryn Etherington played the biggest role in the upset, as she blasted a first-inning two-run home run to stake Algona (9-13, 3-8 NCC) to a 2-0 lead. She added a RBI single in the seventh and finished 2 for 3 at the dish.

But Etherington did more than just hit.

The right-handed pitcher also held the WCHS lineup in check and put up eight strikeouts in her complete-game win. Etherington constantly wiggled out of jams, including in the fourth and sixth frames when WCHS put two runners aboard with no outs, yet walked away with nothing both times.

“Our bats were a little slow,” Howard said. “We weren’t driving through the zone and just made it too easy on them to make plays. We’ve got to do a better job.”

Etherington’s first-inning dinger to left set the tone for the contest.

“They came out to play from the first pitch and you have to give them credit,” Howard said. “It’s anybody’s game every time you step onto the field.”

The Lynx own eighth-grader shined as well. Lead-off hitter Taylor McKinney went 3 for 4 at the dish with a double, two runs scored and two stolen bases.

McKinney laced a shot back up the middle in the bottom of the first and then scored on a RBI ground ball off the bat of Allie Flaws.

In the seventh, McKinney drilled a two-strike pitch from Etherington into the gap in left-center for a double and touched the plate again on Taylor Schnathorst’s ground ball to the right side.

“She’s doing a great job for us,” Howard said of McKinney. “She had a big hit for us in that seventh inning.”

Flaws and clean-up hitter Cassidy Nerland both went 2 for 4 and Cynthia Whitehill added a second-inning base hit to right field.

WCHS finished with eight stolen bases, three of them coming from Flaws. The speedy senior now has 42 on the season, tops among all 4A players and seventh in all classes. She’s been thrown out just twice.

Nicole Smidt produced two hits for Algona. Her line-drive shot off the foot of Lynx pitcher Gabbi Hoversten in the sixth inning ignited the late-inning flurry for the Bulldogs.

Hoversten surrendered seven hits and struck out six in a losing effort.

WCHS will try to deny Humboldt’s quest for outright ownership of the NCC crown when the two teams tangle in Humboldt this evening. The Lynx close out the league slate at home against Clear Lake on Friday, while the Wildcats will host Algona on the same night.