The varsity softball team ended their regular season strong with a win against Pacific on Oct. 13. It was the Falcon’s last game before districts, which is being held at Summit this year.
Junior Amanda Mehrtens said that getting the first run is always an important component that gets the game started.
“It’s always exciting to get that first run, because it gets everyone going. It gets [the] momentum running. Getting that first run is [a] staple to getting further in the game and getting those 19 runs,” Mehrtens said.
Head coach Chad Jones hitting skills helped the team win, which helped them gain 19 runs. Since they were so ahead, Jones said they were able to let people play more and try out different positions when they usually wouldn’t.
“The hitting definitely went well, [but] we didn’t play as clean as we’d want defensively. I think we made three errors in that game. But, we have some people playing in some different positions, just to get people in the field and experience some different things. We had a girl that wanted to catch, so we let her catch for an inning. [We] hadn’t done that before.You’re always running that fine line of trying to be clean, but also kind of giving them the positive experiences at the last game,” Jones said.
Though the first few innings went well, Mehrtens said that at the end of the game, their defense started to falter, which caused more runs to be scored by the other team.
“I think the only thing [that] didn’t go well was our defense. [In] the last inning, I think that we let it slip up, and knowing that we had 19 runs, we kind of let off, and I think we should have just kind of kept strong for those last three outs. I think that would have led to a better score,” Mehrtens said.
During the innings when the other team started scoring, senior Sarah Hou said that they had a pretty large student section watching them, which made many girls slightly anxious.
“I think that girls got nervous when we got a student section. We had the entire varsity football team show up, and girls started making mistakes in the field, and one thing leads to another,” Hou said.
Though the other team did score, Summit still came out on top at the end of the game, which Jones thought was good for the team and their skills.
“We had one bad inning, so it was good for our girls to be able to bounce back and after having a bad inning, come right back out and score five runs to get the game over with. It was just nice to see them respond positively after having a bad inning,” Jones said.
Mehrtens said that one thing that went well during the season was the friendships between everyone on the team.
“I think [one thing that went] well was our team chemistry, for sure. That’s always been great throughout the whole season. I would also say our energy. We were always very energized. Even though we were winning by a lot, we were still having fun and trying to even get more runs,” Mehrtens said.
One thing that Jones thinks is that the team can achieve a lot, but said that they still have some ways to go in improving and learning how to succeed more.
“[The season went] up and down. We had some injuries [that] we dealt with early that we’re still kind of dealing with. But I think overall, looking at it, our highs have been really high, but our lows have probably been a little bit too low for this group. I know what we’re capable of, and it’s a super high level, and so I’m really hoping that now that we’re in the postseason, we can get to that level more consistently, and the girls can kind of experience some success,” Jones said.
