LEESVILLE—Five unanswered runs in the final two innings for Rosepine Thursday night in summer baseball at Leesville were enough break a tie and secure victory. Rosepine defeated Leesville 12-7.

Brandon Russell pitched the final two innings for Rosepine (5-1 league play) when it went ahead and gave up no earned runs and recorded four strikeouts.

Justin Simmons pitched the first five innings for Rosepine and came out when the game was tied 7-7.

“We’ve done what we needed to do early,” Rosepine head coach Jeff Smith said. “We threw strikes. We didn’t walk people.

“They made contact, put some pressure on our defense early scored a few runs. We held them off brought Brandon in. He did a great job the last two innings and gave our offense a chance to come through late.”

Trey Thomas and Dakota James each went 3-for-4 from the plate for Rosepine.

“We’ve done OK,” Smith said. “We got some timely hitting last night with runners in scoring position. They made a couple of errors that were very costly to them. Overall it was a good game.”

Rosepine is back in action at 6 p.m. Tuesday when it travels to South Beau.

Smith discussed what he thought it would take for Rosepine to beat South Beau.

“Just keep it simple,” Smith said. “We’re going to have to not walk people.”

Smith said the pitchers would have to not give three ball counts to hitters, the batters would have to get to the plate and drive runners in and Rosepine could not give South Beau opportunities to take advantage of miscues.

“That’s pretty much what we try to do every game,” Smith said.