The Central Whidbey Little League 9/10 softball all-stars jumped to an early lead and steadily pulled away from Sedro-Woolley for a 12-6 win in the district tournament in Mount Vernon Thursday, July 2.

With the win, Central Whidbey earned a rematch with North Whidbey in the championship round. Central Whidbey will have to defeat North Whidbey twice to snare the title because it lost to NWLL 11-10 earlier in the tournament. The first game is Friday; the second is at 3 p.m. on Saturday.

Central Whidbey pushed across four runs in the first inning against Sedro-Woolley and never trailed.

Singles by Stella Johnson, Mckaela Meffert and Isabelle Wells, a walk to Chanel Sterna and a hit batter, Gwen Gustafson, led to the four-run inning.

Sedro-Woolley tallied a lone run in the second inning, then Central Whidbey added three more in the third to go up 7-1. With two outs, consecutive walks to Gustafson, Jill Prince, Abby Mulholland, Chloe Larue and Kaia Richmond resulted in the three runs.

Central Whidbey kept rolling, scoring twice in the fourth inning and three times in the fifth.

In the fourth, four walks (to Meffert, Wells, Gustafson and Prince) and a single by Sterna produced a pair of runs.

A triple by Sterna and along with an other string of walks (Larue, Richmond, Johnson and Meffert) resulted in the final three runs.

In all, Sedro-Woolley pitchers walked 14 batters.

Sedro-Woolley scored single runs in the third, fourth and sixth innings and two in the fifth, but pitcher Sterna kept Sedro-Woolley from mounting any big innings with 12 strikeouts.