Lady Eagles Battle Injuries & Opponents
Lady Eagles Battle Injuries & Opponents
ECS Softball Team Prepares for Tough Second Half of the Season
Photos / Rich Rumfola
As April turns to May, the Ellicottville Lady Eagles softball team sits in the middle of the pack in the Chautauqua-Cattaraugus Athletic Association East Division 2 standings with a 5-3 overall record (4-2 in league play) and the entire second half of their schedule is set to be played in the next two weeks.
Like the exceptionally warm weather they played in, the Ellicottville offense started this Spring so hot that through their first four contests in the 2023 season, the Lady Eagles were a perfect 4-0 and had outscored their opponents by a 68-24 margin.
“Our defense wasn’t playing as well as I had hoped when the year started,” explained Ellicottville coach Matt Finn. “But we were hitting the ball really well and our offense was playing fantastic.”
Averaging 17 runs per game through those first four contests may have given some of the players the sense that the rest of the season might just be that easy.
“It was so good of a start for us, that a couple of the girls came in before practice one day and told me that they were surprised that we were off to a better start than they had expected,” Finn said.
This was a conversation that Coach found equally encouraging and troublesome at the same time, because he knew that his team hadn’t performed all that well defensively and they had “given up lots of runs.”
It was right about then that the wheels came off the Ellicottville scoring machine. The Lady Eagles dropped a 13-2 decision to league-leading Portville on April 20 at Ellicottville, after the visiting Lady Panthers got off the bus and sprinted out to a 12-0 lead just two innings into the contest. Doing the math, Ellicottville “won” the remainder of that matchup, outscoring the Class C visitors 2-1, over the final five innings of play.
The very next evening, the Lady Eagles ran into a buzz saw in Olean and dropped a 19-1 decision to the Class B Lady Huskies, who were undefeated when they played Ellicottville and remain a perfect 9-0 on the season today.
“They were hitting line drives, they were hitting the gaps, they were hitting it where we weren’t standing,” Finn admitted in praise of Olean.
Thanks to the ten-run rule, the Lady Huskies only batted five times. Olean currently sits atop the CCAA East Div. 2 standings, as well as near the top of all Class B schools in Western New York.
Following the Olean game, the Lady Eagles then split a pair of one-run games with a 4-3 win over Franklinville and 14-13 loss to North Collins, which gets the girls to the season’s mid-point with a 5-3 record. Without dropping a “could have, should have, or would have” on you, the Lady Eagles record could easily be one tick better at 6-2, as the girls really came out of the North Collins contest holding the short end of the stick.
Cruising to a commanding 10-3 lead after four innings, the Lady Eagles were plagued by an incredibly unfortunate string of injuries which forced four players to exit at the mid-point of the game and resulted in more than half the team playing unfamiliar defensive positions.
The very next North Collins at-bats yielded a 10-run inning to put the home team up by three, 13-10, and although the Lady Eagles fought back to tie the game with three runs in the top of the seventh, last ups for the home team proved to be the deciding factor in the one-run victory.
Offensively, Finn’s squad is led by junior shortstop Jaida Mendell and senior catcher/outfielder Allison Rowland, who have each posted batting averages close to .600 for the season and both girls each have a pair of home runs to their credit.
Other offensive standouts for the Lady Eagles include freshman pitcher Ande Northrup and sophomore catcher/1B Courtney Marsh, who each sport a batting average north of .450 and have combined to score 22 runs for the team. In fact, Marsh’s two-run homer in the Portville game accounted for all the scoring for Ellicottville on that day.
Defensively, the Lady Eagles are led by freshman pitching phenom, Ande Northrup, who has pitched every single inning her team has played this season. Let that sink in for awhile. Northrup’s a freshman, she dominates, and she hasn’t left the mound for any other reason than the end of the game.
“Ande is mentally one of the toughest people I’ve ever been around,” Finn said of his young pitcher. “She pitched for (the varsity team) last year as an eighth grader and in her first game, the second batter she faced hit a homer over the fence.”
Finn praised the way his young pitcher handled the pressure that day saying, “She got the next batter out, struck out the batter after that to get out of the inning and settled in to pitch the rest of the game - which is so impressive - especially for someone so young!”
Instead of singling out defensive standouts from his team, Finn went on to say how proud he was of all the girls - especially when so many of them had been playing out of position after the Lady Eagles were beset with injuries.
Looking ahead to the second half of the season, the remainder of the regular-season slate of games will be played this week and next, with the final contest before the playoffs coming at home on Monday, May 15 versus North Collins.
As a very loose guideline, the Class (A,B,C,D) system is the way New York State separates schools by enrollment numbers for purposes of athletic competition. The schools with the largest enrollments play each other in Class A, while the smallest of the small schools play each other in Class D, and everyone else fits in somewhere in the middle - Classes B & C.
As a way of attempting to limit the amount of travel high school athletes have to go through during the regular season, ‘leagues’ or ‘conferences’ are set up with the idea that member teams would not have to spend more than 30 minutes traveling to ‘away’ games. During the regular season, teams are placed in these leagues or conferences, irregardless of the size of their school, and they play each other to determine a league champ, but also to achieve a ranking within their own class for playoff seeding. Once playoffs begin, schools will only compete against teams in their own class. Currently, Ellicottville competes in Class D for all sports - including the combined Franklinville-Ellicottville Titans (football and track & field) teams.
Even for coaches and parents with lots of experience, the classification system is cumbersome to understand. Suffice it to say, though, that everyone’s goal is to be the Section VI champion of their class.