This season, the Middle School softball team worked together to create a winning team capable of facing tough opponents, finishing the season with 5–6–1 record.
The BatCats faced tough losses, like a close 5 – 6 game with Marist, but celebrated big wins, such as 25 – 2 over Pace Academy and 15 – 1 over Blessed Trinity.
Blakley Murray and Lydia Williams delivered great pitching in the circle, and Joy Stallworth, Jackie Post, and Zoey Le-Smith provided standout defensive performances. Bats came alive offensively, especially from Madeline Gilfedder, Anna Ford, and Zoey Le-Smith.
Team manager Tahir Mason enjoyed all of the pre-game prep and having fun with the team before getting serious. “My favorite thing [was] the pregame prep . . . just eating the food, then as the manager, going up for a carry gallons of water around . . . that’s fun . . . right before the lock-in,” she said.
8th grader Hailey Tepper was happy to practice together as a team because last year the heat index was too high for any sport to practice. “We actually had practice this season because last season, all of our practices got wet-bulbed, and a bunch of our games got canceled,” she said.
7th grader Catherine Aebersold valued the season for the way it strengthened previously-formed friendships. “I think that we worked very well together . . . I think everyone got along well, and I feel like some of us knew each other beforehand, so it really helped build on our friendships,” she said.
7th grader Madeline Gilfedder also loved the team environment and getting to know all of the girls. “It felt really fun because you got to connect with people that are and aren’t in your grade . . . [and] just having a community in the team,” she says. “It was really fun to, like, connect with people, [and] I think it was a really good team dynamic.”
7th Grader Joy Stallworth appreciated how the eighth graders made her feel a part of the team. “They were really nice and they included everybody, which I really did not expect. I got to know them really well,” she says.
The teams achieved success with an entirely new coaching staff. New Head Coach Lauren Carter made a big adjustment going from coaching the varsity team to coaching the Middle School team. The team also welcomed a new Assistant Coach, Cybil Sather, who had to adapt from solely teaching Visual Arts to now also coaching a fall sport.
Carter loves the fundamentals and how the sport can be for pleasure and not competitive. “I love the fundamentals of the game,” she says. “So going down to the middle school level, you really have to work a little bit more on the fundamentals . . . I like the middle school level just because it’s still fun . . . and sometimes it doesn’t have to be as serious as the varsity level.”
Sather believes that there were many pros and cons of having a larger group of girls on the team. “We had a big group that made it hard in some ways, but great in other ways having so many girls, knowing full well that not everybody can make [it to] everything [game],” she says. “So it was nice to have extra. But then it was also difficult to get everybody enough playing time as well.”
Carter also felt that the number of players on the team could make distributing playing time much harder. “We played with 16, and that’s a lot of girls when you only have 9 that play on the field . . . substitution is much harder because you’re really working around innings and scoring,” she says.
While having a larger group of girls on the team was challenging, Tepper also loved getting to spend time with her fellow teammates at the games. “My favorite thing about the season was probably hanging out with friends on the buses to games and in the dugouts.”