With just four games left of the 2017 softball season, senior right fielder Leah Allen is doing all she can to cement her legacy as one of the greatest players to ever grace Penn Park.
Heading into the weekend, Allen already held program records for stolen bases (with 58) and home runs (with 29), and was second in program history in hits and triples, with 179 and 9, respectively. In the Quakers’ (18-8, 8-8 Ivy) pair of doubleheaders against Cornell, Allen smashed three home runs to bring her season stat line to eight and extend her school record to 32, another Penn record.
And if all of those accolades weren’t enough, the lefty batter broke yet another Red and Blue record during Penn’s first game against the Big Red (10-24-1, 4-12), this time for career RBI. In the top of the seventh inning, Allen launched a rocket past the fence to give the Quakers a 5-3 advantage over Cornell and notch her 124th career RBI. Penn would go on to score three more runs to take the first meeting 8-3.
In the second game of the day, the Big Red got the best of the Quakers despite another home run and a trio of RBI from Allen. After setting a new program record in the first game of the day, the Woodbine, Md., native brought her career mark to 127.
Despite the split on Saturday, Penn was able to pull off two wins in their final games against Cornell and bring their Ivy record to 0.500. In the first match up of the day, the Quakers only needed five innings to shut down their opponents. While the game would be scoreless until the fourth inning, Penn scored five in the bottom of the fourth and two more in the fifth to capture an 8-0 win.
Penn kept its bats hot in the weekend finale, beating the Big Red 7-3 with just six hits. The performance was a marked improvement from last weekend’s showing against Princeton when the Red and Blue left 25 runners on base in four games.
Although the Quakers are no longer in contention for an Ivy title this season after last weekend’s quartet of losses to Princeton, Allen has continued to provide Penn with an offensive spark. Her fiery presence at bat over the weekend – and over the course of her career wearing the Red and Blue – is why she’s earned the title of Weekend MVP.
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