By DAVE O’SULLIVAN
Staff Writer
If you ask any successful high school coach — one that is playing for a sectional championship, for instance — they’ll point to a particular game that was the turning point in their team’s season.
Rarely can two coaches point to the same game as the one that turned their season around. But that’s what happened for a pair of Cape-Atlantic League softball teams this season, Mainland Regional and Egg Harbor Township.
They met on May 8 in Egg Harbor Township, and that’s the day the season turned around for both teams — one because they won, and the other because they lost.
EHT, a perennial state championship contender under former coach Mary Dunlap and current coach Kristi Troster, were 12-7 at that point but still ranked in the top 20 in the state. Mainland, on the other hand, was just 4-10 and had suffered through a six-game losing streak during the final two weeks of April.
But on that day, Mainland jumped out to a 3-0 lead and then scored a run in the top of the seventh off EHT star pitcher Madison Dollard to squeak out a 4-3 victory over the Eagles. Mainland put 10 runners on base via either a hit or a walk, and came away with some newfound confidence. The Stangs had scored four runs and won a game against one of the best pitchers South Jersey has ever seen, one who finished her career with more than 400 strikeouts.
“We had a huge win at EHT, beating them 4-3, and that was the evidence we needed that we could beat anybody. That’s the attitude we had — that if we can beat EHT, which at the time was No. 13 in the state, we can beat anybody in New Jersey. That’s the attitude we took and tried to keep reinforcing that. Just keep working, win the day, get one percent better each day — all those mantras. We had to believe that we actually could accomplish what we want to,” said Mainland coach Brian Smith following his team’s state playoff win over Ocean City. “We worked hard and stayed the course all season long. We took our lumps. The CAL American division is brutal. There were three teams that were in the Top 20 in the state at various times of the year with EHT, St. Joe and Vineland, plus you add in Millville, Hammonton and Cedar Creek — it’s a brutal schedule that we play in the regular season. We took our lumps, but we kept telling them, ‘believe in yourselves.’ We have some seniors who have been there, and we have some young girls who needed to come along. We had to develop and find the right pieces to the puzzle. They stayed the course.”
Mainland lost two straight games after that win over EHT, but then went on a six-game winning streak that saw the Mustangs, seeded No. 10 in the South Jersey Group 3 tournament, advance all the way to the sectional championship game before falling to Moorestown.
The Stangs still finished the season with a sub-.500 record at 11-13, but were one of the hottest teams in South Jersey in late May.
EHT, on the other hand, took that loss to Mainland to heart. The Eagles felt like they were much better than an eight-loss team, and had to refocus their energy if they were going to live up to the high standards of their predecessors.
The Eagles won eight of their final 10 games, beating highly touted Southern Regional and Kingsway in the sectional playoffs before falling, 4-3, in the South Jersey Group 4 title game to Vineland.
“Honestly, the loss to Mainland, that hit hard,” Troster said after the sectional semifinal win over top-seeded Kingsway. “That was our Senior Day, that was supposed to be a lot of things. I think sometimes it just has to hit at the right bad spot, and it did. That hit a nerve, where everybody in that moment decided that we needed to pick it up and do better, and they have ever since. I’m really proud of them. I called it the ‘come to Jesus’ softball moment, because we obviously had a team talk the next practice, and since then, they’ve been a different set of girls.”
May 8 was a defining moment for two teams — one because they won, and another because they lost.
Contact Dave O’Sullivan: sullyglorydays@gmail.com.
(Correspondent Brian Tortella contributed to this report)
