Eureka Softball didn’t come just to have a season of fun. They showed up ready, hungry for success. With a record of 22-6, and going undefeated in districts, the team made a statement. But being a successful team isn’t just down to these extremely talented girls. It also comes down to the team’s dynamic.
“The dynamic this year has been honestly better than the past,” Haley Deakin, 12, said. “This year we started playing for ourselves instead of for everybody else.”
That hunger for the game is what took them deep in the playoffs, winning the district championship 6-5 in a come from behind win against rival Lafayette. The team eventually lost to Lindbergh, putting up a hard fight while dealing with a controversial call on the field, with a packed stand full of fans.
“Everybody is always so hype,” Maddie Rakey, 12, said. “The bus rides are so fun and everyone has so much energy in the dugout.”
A close team bond set the table for success this year.
“We’ve always had a bunch of athletes who have been super good talent wise, but this year we’re playing together which helps us stand apart from other teams,” Rakey said. “I feel like we all play together and for each other and we’re all focused on the same thing. The girls make showing up everyday worth it and so much fun.”
Rakey’s personal goal for this season was to spend less time worrying and more time enjoying the game.
“My mindset this year is to not get in my head as much and to focus on having fun and being there since it’s my last season,” Rakey said.
Junior Varsity Coach Madison Pogue gets to watch from a different perspective, as she not only has the opportunity to coach, but is a Eureka softball alumni.
“I think that they really came together as a family when they really wanted to win, like our championship game,” Pogue said. “We were down a couple bats and we decided to start hitting for each other. It’s a family, that’s the biggest thing I’ve seen getting to help coach varsity.”
Ms. Pogue also adored her time on softball.
“It’s similar [now] to when I was in high school,” Pogue said.
She also added how the coaches not only care on the field, but off of it as well.
“Even when I went to college, I was still getting checked in on by Mosley and the other coaches,” Pogue said.
Her goal as a coach is to create that same coach-player relationship that she got to experience in high school. But her focus goes beyond getting the players ready for the varsity level physically.
“Mental health is a big thing when it comes to sports and life in general,” Pogue said.
She likes to teach her team no matter how they’re performing in the game to always keep a positive mindset and try their best. As a former high school athlete herself, she understands the stress that comes with a sport, and how much a good head space can positively affect your performance.
That positive headspace was more difficult to maintain following the playoffs loss to Lindbergh. After a Lindbergh player sat down after three strikes, the field scoreboard wasn’t updated with the count. Although Eureka players, parents, coaches and video on the GameChanger app all showed that the batter had three strikes, it ultimately came down to Lindbergh’s scorekeeper to make the call, which showed the batter had two strikes, continuing the inning and culminating in Lindbergh taking the lead.
“We feel cheated,” PJ Arway, Language Arts teacher and Softball assistant coach, said. ”We’re stuck dealing with the emotion, the frustration whatever you want to call it. And yet placing blame does no good. This one hurts because we feel like we deserved better, and everything that happened was not in our control.”
However, this is a powerful teaching moment for the team.
“Don’t make it come down to one play,” Arway said. “If we played well enough that we were in control and that one play was taken out of your hand, how do you reconcile that?”
