For six innings Friday at Dell Diamond, the story looked like a pitcher’s duel — Rachel Garcia on one side, Sam Landry on the other, and a Texas Volts lineup that could not solve a pitcher it once called its own.
Then the seventh inning rewrote everything.
Portland scored five runs on three home runs in the top of the frame — an Athletes Unlimited Softball League record for runs in a seventh inning — to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 5-1 Cascade win and snap Texas’s two-game winning streak. The Volts fell to 3-8 to open a three-game home set against Portland, one of the league’s two 2026 expansion clubs.
Landry’s homecoming
The cruelest twist for Texas fans may have been the name in the circle for Portland: Sam Landry, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 AUSL amateur draft who spent her rookie professional season in purple.
Landry went 1-5 with a 4.85 ERA for the Volts in 2025, then was left unprotected in the expansion draft and selected second overall by Portland in December. On Friday she came back to Round Rock as a different pitcher — 2-1 with a 1.15 ERA entering the night — and authored a complete-game two-hitter with four strikeouts. The only blemish came in the third, when Jackie Lis doubled, advanced on Leighann Goode’s sacrifice, and scored on Danieca Coffey’s sacrifice fly. The win lifted Landry to 3-1 and trimmed her ERA to 1.11.
Cascade coach Tairia Flowers said it would have been a shame for Landry to take a loss after she held Texas to one run on one hit into the seventh against her former club.
“She threw a gem,” Flowers said. “I’m glad we were able to keep her in there for the whole seven and to figure it out to get her the win.”
Volts head coach Ricci Woodard tipped her cap to the performance — and shouldered part of the blame for leaving Garcia in to face Portland’s top of the order a fourth time.
“Obviously, hats off,” Woodard said. “Sam Landry threw a heck of a game. You can’t get just one hit and think you’re going to keep the momentum of the game. I thought Rachel Garcia threw a heck of a game. I told her, ‘That one’s on me,’ because I probably should have changed her when we got to the top of the seventh with the top of the lineup. It’s hard to throw in this league four times against the same hitters.”
Garcia had been lights out for 6.2 innings — eight strikeouts, a season-high in innings, and only two earned runs on the stat sheet despite five crossing the plate. Woodard still saw plenty to like in how Texas played outside the seventh.
“Tough game all the way around,” she said. “I thought we played a really great game, and so did they.”
Defense that held — until it didn’t
The Volts’ best defensive moment of the night came in the fourth, when Jalia Lassiter robbed Korbe Otis with a diving catch in left field on a ball that looked ticketed for the gap. Otis had to wait until the seventh for her revenge.
Behind her, Texas played errorless ball through six innings — the kind of clean support that kept Garcia in front and the Cascade off the board until the seventh.
But the seventh opened with Jennings booting a grounder from Sis Bates, and Garcia’s throwing error on Sydney Stewart’s comebacker later in the frame extended the inning. Three of Portland’s five runs were unearned. Bates scored on Otis’s two-run homer to left; Grant followed with a solo shot to center; and Cahalan’s two-run blast to right — her first professional home run — capped the scoring in a nine-batter frame.
‘We were one swing away’
Otis, hitting .344 as Portland’s leadoff bat, said the Cascade never stopped believing while Landry dealt.
“I didn’t feel like there was any quit,” Otis said. “We all knew Sam was throwing a really good game. That was obviously in the back of our minds. I think that we were all bought in. We bought into each other. It showed in that inning. It was awesome.”
She credited the mindset Portland carried out of the dugout huddle.
“That’s the game of softball,” Otis said. “Sometimes you hit it right at somebody. Sometimes that’s just how the game goes. Just keep swinging. We said in the huddle, ‘We’re one swing away.’ So I think that mindset really helped us.”
The rally made Landry the winning pitcher in the ballpark where she was once the franchise’s top draft pick — and left Texas searching for answers in a series that would only get harder from there.
Anthony Rivera, Dell Diamond press box. Stats from the official AUSL box score; Otis and Woodard quotes via OurSports Central.