Staff photo by Travis Rosenau Bethany Lutheran College’s Anna Lee slides into second safely as a throw from home gets by Martin Luther College’s Anna Busch during a UMAC softball game at MLC on Friday.

NEW ULM — Friday evening’s game won’t go down in the win column for the Martin Luther College Knights, but there were positives for the team considering their opponent was a conference rival who historically has had the edge.

Scattering 10 hits, the Bethany Lutheran College Vikings pushed their win streak against the Knights to 11 games with a 5-0 shutout in an Upper Midwest Athletic Conference softball game at MLC.

The Vikings (11-8, 1-0) are now 40-21 against the Knights all time, but the Knights kept Friday’s game within reach thanks in large part to starting pitcher Jess Horn, who recently became the program’s all-time leader in innings pitched and now has 473 2/3 innings pitched in her career.

Unfortunately for the senior, she and her Knights fell to 0-11 on the season and 0-1 in the UMAC with Friday’s loss. Horn allowed 10 hits and just one walk for five runs in the complete-game effort. She struck out four, however, and didn’t run into much trouble until the later innings.

“Jess is a workhorse,” MLC head coach Becca Kvam said. “She came into college not expecting to pitch a whole ton, and she’s just done everything we’ve asked. She’s a kid who you ask her to jump, she says, ‘How high?’ and, ‘Can I do it again?’ So we really appreciate that our of her. She pitched a really nice game today, getting four strikeouts out of them and just really hitting her spots and doing everything we asked her to do. … We know Bethany is a good hitting team, so our goal was to just come in here and limit that as much as possible and I feel Jess really executed on that today.”

Kaiha Mork got the win in the circle for BLC with a complete-game shutout. She struck out nine and allowed five hits and no walks.

Hannah Ott led the Knights at the plate, going 1 for 3 with a double.

BLC was led at the plate by Bryn Weidner, who was 2 for 4 with an RBI and two stolen bases, while Mork was 2 for 4 with an RBI and Emily Doyle was 2 for 4 with a triple.

After a scoreless first two innings, BLC added a run in the third when a Weidner single scored Anna Lee, who was 1 for 2 with a walk in the game. Aliya Edbom-Keh brought in Doyle on a sac fly in the fourth inning for a 2-0 BLC lead.

A scoreless fifth was followed by some trouble for the Knights in the sixth when the Vikings loaded the bases with one out. Horn was able to get a grounder to shortstop Katelyn Rassat and force out to catcher Chloe Koschnitzke at home for the second out of the inning, but Hayven Linn stole home moments later for a 3-0 BLC lead.

Mork and Emily Nelson each had an RBI single in the seventh to make it 5-0.

The Knights had some trouble at the plate throughout much of the game, getting just a single in the first from Koschnitzke before going three innings without a hit. The Knights got singles from Chloe Berg and Rachel McCaughna in the fifth but stranded both runners.

The Knights then got two more hits in the seventh, a double by Ott and a one-out single by Anna Busch. The Knights loaded the bases after a dropped ball at first on a bunt from McCaughna, but Mork struck out the next two batters she saw to end the game.

“We definitely have a very different team than what we had last year,” Kvam said. “We’re very young. Our of our 15 players, six of them are freshmen, so we’re definitely figuring things out. We’ve kind of seen a pattern of like, we’re figuring it out on one side of the ball and then we struggle on the other. So we’re working on really trying to figure out how to pull all that together. I thought we definitely had our opportunities today, we just didn’t capitalize on them. We’ve got find a way to string together a couple of hits.”

The Knights were also without starting sophomore center fielder Sarah Yonkovich, out with a broken finger, and senior outfielder Amelia Thiel, out with illness. Kvam is hoping to get the two into the lineup again as soon as they’re healthy.

The Knights welcome the Vikings back for an afternoon doubleheader Saturday, starting at 1 p.m.