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VALLEY’S BEST
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Champion players, from left, Lindsay Swipas, Haley McAllister and Alison Sorber pose with the Division III state championship trophy following the Golden Flashes’ 2-0 win over Bloom-Carroll on Saturday in Akron.
By Matthew Peaslee and Tom Williams
AKRON
This weekend capped off more than six months of preparation and desire. Many practices and games with wins, losses and memories came to a close at Firestone Stadium in Akron.
The Valley sent three softball teams to the state semifinals, two to the finals and one brought back a championship trophy.
“It’s indescribable,” Champion senior Alison Sorber said after the Golden Flashes beat Bloom-Carroll 2-0 in the Division III final on Saturday for their second consecutive state title. “It’s an accomplishment just to make it to state, let alone winning back-to-back in the state tournament.”
Champion scored a pair of runs in the second inning and held off the Bulldogs as pitcher Lindsay Swipas struck out 10 and came just a few pitches away from a no-hitter.
“It was exciting, wasn’t it?” Champion coach Cheryl Weaver said. “That’s what you get. When you are making it to the state, you’re going to see the cream of the crop.”
The Flashes showed that experience in the title game is an intangible a team wants on its side.
“It’s a big advantage once you’ve been in the state championship game the year before,” Bloom-Carroll coach Choc Woods said. “It helps a lot. They’ve been here, it makes a difference.”
Mathews, making its first trip to the state final, fell to Convoy Crestview, 6-2 in Div. IV.
“We said at the beginning of the year that we were going to set a tradition for the entire high school, a standard everyone wants to emulate,” first-year Mathews coach Jim Nicula said.
“We are a small school so these girls are going to be playing other sports,” Nicula said. “We hope [this success carries] over to the others because we want our volleyball team, our basketball team, everybody doing well.”
The Mustangs lose just one senior and pitcher Cheyenne Eggens is just a freshman.
Crestview freshman pitcher Tarra Crowle limited the hard-hitting Mustangs to four hits.
“Sometimes we were a little over-excited in the [batter’s] box,” junior center fielder Tabby Granelly said. “We should have waited and made her work a little bit more.
“Anybody can be beaten on any given day and it just wasn’t our day,” Granelly said. “Like I told everybody as we were going to hit for those last three outs, the game is not over until they get that last third out. But the biggest [lesson] is that any team can be beaten on any given day.”
Poland found that out on a rainy Friday at Firestone. Ace Erin Gabriel surrendered only two hits, but walked five as Keystone scored four runs in its shutout victory to avenge last year’s loss to Poland by the same score in the state title game.
The Wildcats (32-0) completed their undefeated season on Saturday with a 7-2 win over Greenville in the Div. II final.
A case can be made that Poland is Ohio’s second-best team. Reid Lamport’s Bulldogs defeated three of the four teams that qualified in Div. I: North Canton Hoover (3-2), Lebanon (2-1) and Elyria (10-1). Hoover won the crown with a 2-0 win over Lebanon.
Poland also owns victories over two Florida teams that won state titles.
“When you can do that, you look back on it and say ‘you know what? That was something done pretty well,’” said Lamport who is retiring after 23 seasons with a record of 530-115.
Keystone pitcher Kenzie Conrad, who finished 25-0, said her team was inspired by the 2011 loss to Gabriel, a member of the USA Softball program.
“We have been preparing all season, working — not even kidding — with the pitching machine 10 feet away from us as fast as it could go. We were all seeing the ball so well.”
Conrad limited the Bulldogs to three singles in the game that had a two-hour rain delay.
Right before the game was delayed, Gabriel walked three successive batters then had a wild pitch that allowed a run to score in Keystone’s three-run fifth inning.
“[Gabriel and Jenna Modic] have been there and they’ve done it all,” Lamport said. “This group of seniors is just phenomenal. They have put their mark on Poland softball and enabled Poland softball to put its mark on the state of Ohio. I’m just real proud of them.”
Gabriel said the loss “shouldn’t define what we’ve done the past four years.”
Challenged by the slippery conditions, Gabriel said, “That’s no excuse — I needed to get my job done. It’s frustrating that one inning hurt us.”
Poland qualified for state three straight seasons and split two title games.
Looking back on a full season may put into perspective how special it is to make a final four.
“When you start out day one, the first day of practice, you don’t think, ‘hey, we’re going to be in the state finals,’” Bloom-Carroll’s Woods said.
After it’s all said and done, there are highs and lows and life lessons learned. Whether the next step is playing ball at the highest collegiate level — at the University of Tennessee like Gabriel and Miami (Ohio) like Modic. Or focusing on becoming a top-notch accountant like Lindsay Swipas — high school competition will always fuel great things.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s your last high school game, you’re last college game or your last travel ball game — it means a lot,” Weaver said. “It is hard to walk away from something that you love and you’ve done so well.”