When a baseball team is out of sync, wins don’t come easy. But when all the moving parts work in concert, as they did in Niwot’s 6-1 win at Longmont on Tuesday, the scoreboard really sings.

Leading up to the contest, the Cougars had suffered four straight losses, including twice against out-of-state teams from their spring break trip. For the most part, they had struggled to get their bats going consistently, but whatever plagued them before seemed to evaporate like the graupel that delayed their game against the Trojans by 45 minutes.

Their defense was as cold as the wind that froze out all in attendance.

“We were definitely just making the plays when we needed to, because our struggle this year has been errors, and we made all the plays in this game and our pitching was phenomenal,” senior right-handed pitcher Jagger Kilpatrick said. “I think that pitching has been the only thing that’s been keeping us in a lot of our games.”

Kilpatrick threw the first two innings and yielded five strikeouts and no earned runs, before fellow senior Kaige Kennedy took over and closed out the remaining five frames with 10 knockouts and just one earned run. Kilpatrick was a menace in the batter’s box, too, raking in three RBIs on a double and a triple.

He’s hoping that this victory, which padded earlier wins against Severance (8-7 score), The Academy (12-2) and Forest Grove (13-6) can lay the foundation for the rest of season as all of the cogs in the offense and defense start to fit together a little better.

“I think that we can build off this game a lot, because we’ve had five losses in a row, so we kind of needed this one to get back on the train a little bit,” Kilpatrick said. “We hit the ball pretty good today, but I think that we just cashed in all of our runs. We didn’t really leave that many runners stranded, so that was the biggest thing.”

Longmont, on the other hand, entered the contest with a balmy 6-1 record but uncharacteristically struggled to get much past Niwot’s defense. The lone breakthrough came from its veteran frontman, senior catcher Collin Pool, who hit paydirt with an RBI double in the bottom of the fifth.

Leading up to Tuesday, the Trojans had enjoyed 42 RBIs and 70 hits, but they only managed three hits against Niwot.

“We’ve been pitching really well, throwing a lot of strikes, making the other team beat us,” Pool explained. “We didn’t really show it today, but our bats have been pretty good, so I think we’ll get back on the train.”

The Cougars improved to 4-5 with the win and will prepare to host Mead on Thursday. Longmont, meanwhile, dropped to 6-2, and will make the trip way down south to Pueblo County on Friday.

“For the rest of the year, we know that we’re going to be facing good teams, good pitching,” Pool said. “This Niwot team is a good team, and we’re going to be facing Broomfield, Erie, Legacy. All those teams are going to be just as good, so it’s a good way to get prepared.”