2009 All Area Softball Team: More to come from this group full of fun-to-watch underclassmen

As beloved broadcaster Dick Vitale would say, “The Diaper Dandies are super scintillating sensational” this year.

In English, what I’m trying to say is the young talent around here is good — really good.

Area softball teams didn’t fully impress in 2009 as far as team achievements go, save a memorable run from the Jonesville girls and another SCAA and district title from Camden-Frontier — but the local pot is boiling over with potential.

For starters, only three All Area players graduated and four of them have reached just the midway point of their careers.

The SCAA is loaded with girls who are only going to get better and the finest example of this is Camden-Frontier’s duo of Morgan Warfield and Megan Schwartzengraber.

As much as people around here have heard Lantis and Gabriele on the baseball side of things for three years, they might hear about these hotshots even more.

Warfield hit .473 with 28 RBIs and her .95  ERA with 175  strikeouts in 94 1/3 innings on the mound is downright nasty.

The only player who really compares in both categories is, you guessed it, the girl with the really long last name that is hard to spell and even harder to forget.

Schwartzengraber had a miniscule 1.09 ERA this year, with 153 strikeouts in 44 2/3 innings and she drove in a team-high 35 runs to go with her .429 average.

Being partners in crime can only help their cause as they push each other to the next level in what they hope can be a regional championship team in the near future.

Taking a bit of a back seat to them as a freshman, but bursting onto the scene this year was Waldron sophomore Kelsy White.

She hit an eye-popping .555 with an on-base percentage of .659 and 28 RBIs. She is also an extremely good defensive catcher for being so young and only time will tell what types of ridiculous career numbers she could end up with.

In Hillsdale they have a super sophomore of their own in Tiki Malone.

She’s the kind of athlete you’d want to have in a fox hole with you, as she has no regard for her body and she expects the same pedal-to-the-metal effort from her teammates.

She continues to improve at the plate and is the kind of leader that could help turn the Hornets program around.

Several area juniors will be difference making seniors next year, most of them as ace pitchers.

Jenna Crawford had trouble filling Bree Harmon’s shoes off the bat, but the Hillsdale junior grew exponentially over the course of the year and she went toe-to-toe with Jonesville senior Kelsey Aemisegger in the district semifinals this year.

Similarly, Pittsford’s Nicole Culbert had many a fine outing on the mound and when she was on, it gave her teammates something to feed off of.

With the aforementioned Aemisegger calling it a career, the Comets will count on Kelly White more than ever next season.

As a junior she won five games pitching, with a 4.30 ERA and 77 strikeouts in 83 innings. She also hit .323 and had 20 RBIs.

The final junior pitcher to watch as a senior is Kasie Owens of Reading.

As Owens went so went the Rangers. She was a workhorse who continues to improve her control and Kelly Mulnix will need all she can get from her next year if Reading wants to take the next step.

The final junior on the All Area squad is Quincy’s Brogan Veysey-White, who hit .424, had an on-base percentage of .600 and melded perfectly with Bree Harmon.

Harmon was one of three seniors on the team, all of who made profound differences at their schools.

Going back to the school she started at, Harmon went 25-3 and broke the Orioles’ career strikeout record in 2009.

Another unfailing force in the area was Aemiesegger. The Comets rode her all the way to a regional semifinals appearance and she will be dearly missed.

She drove in 25 runs and struck out 104 batters in 113 innings.

Last but not least is C-F senior leader Kara Bryner. Melissa Warfield said she has no clue how she’ll replace her and rightfully so. She made teammates laugh, made them work harder and was the quintessential first-rate high school athlete. It doesn’t hurt either that she hit .367 with 27 RBIs.

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Too tough to swallow: Comets' 3-run lead evaporates in final inning

[caption id="attachment_725" align="alignleft" width="450" caption="The Comets needed a few more insurance runs heading into the final inning Saturday."][/caption]

Just when the Jonesville softball team’s magic carpet ride was about to fly to new heights, the rug was pulled out from underneath them and a tough life lesson was served up.

The Comets blew a 3-0 seventh-inning lead and were just one out away from advancing to the regional finals, before Manchester stormed back and shocked Jonesville fans, players and coaches by scoring the game-winning run on an errant throw to first base.

After getting just one hit in the first six innings off Comet ace, senior Kelsey Aemisegger, the Flying Dutchmen came alive in a matter of minutes to put an end to a phenomenal few weeks that saw Jonesville go from an 11-18 team to a near-regional finals squad.

“I told them that unfortunately the lesson we learned was that you have to stay focused for seven full innings, that’s why we play seven innings,” Jonesville head coach Richard Alvarez said. “We lost our focus that last inning and they didn’t. They kept playing for seven innings and we didn’t.”

Alvarez said his girls were high on adrenaline heading to the final inning, but he was still cautiously nervous.

“I believe when you get a team that is that good you can’t let them stick around, you can’t let them think they have a chance,” he said. “I didn’t think three runs was enough and I was trying to motivate my girls to score more runs…but we let them believe they had a chance and they kept fighting and it worked for them.”

Manchester's comeback started with run-scoring doubles by Roxanne Rickert and Jordan Ridenour, but an Aemisegger strikeout left the Flying Dutchmen with two outs and fleeting hope.

That’s when Nicole Jackson hit a run-scoring single, and she scored the game-winning run not a minute later when the next batter hit a ground ball that was fielded well, but thrown past the first baseman.

An immediate silence engulfed the home team’s stands and Alvarez tried to find some purpose in the difficult defeat.

“We talked about using this as a building block. I (said) earlier that all year long we’ve been using these losses as building blocks for what’s coming down the road,” he said. “I talked in the dugout about those players returning — lets use this to take the next step. I’ve always believed that when you get in tournament play and playoffs it’s always a progression — you have to learn to win, then you have to learn to get in the playoffs, then you have to learn to play in the playoffs.”

Jonesville could not have asked for a better start to Saturday’s contest, as Brooke Nichols tripled, before scoring on a Kelly White single in the bottom of the first. The following inning, Jenna Kast got on base thanks to a dropped third strike and errant throw by the catcher, and she eventually scored on a wild pitch.

The Comets added an insurance run in the sixth when Megan Rowe singled, stole a pair of bases and scored on an error, but ultimately it wasn’t enough.

Aemisegger was still stellar in defeat, allowing just four hits and confusing Manchester players by effectively throwing pitches with three distinctively different speeds.

Alvarez called her his “horse down the stretch” and he said she would be difficult to replace next season.

“She’s a very dominant pitcher on the mound and she’s a very good team leader, so yeah it’s going to be tough to replace all four of my seniors. They know I look to them for that leadership, but we’ve got the program going where I’d like it to be and we’ve got younger players coming up and we want to reload, not rebuild.”

Clinton went on to win the regional title, with a 13-0 win over Manchester.

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Comets' magical run takes its show to regionals

[caption id="attachment_706" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The Jonesville Comets will need to get girls on base any way possible this weekend."][/caption]

In its first regionals appearance in school history, Richard Alvarez expects his Jonesville softball team to do more than just show up and enjoy the scenery.

Despite owning just a 14-18 record heading into a Clinton regional full of squads with 23 or more wins, Alvarez believes a precedent for surprising postseason success has been set in the area, and he’d like to continue the tradition.

“We talked about what happened in districts. Nobody gave us a shot at districts and look what happened. If it can happen at districts, it can happen anywhere at any level,” he said. “I also used Hillsdale’s (state championship) baseball team from two years as an example. They had a (sub-.500) record, so I told the girls once you get into the tournament anything can happen.”

Anything, such as an upset of district host Hanover-Horton (20-14), did happen just last week, but they will have to beat Manchester (23-14) in a 12:30 p.m. contest on Saturday to keep the feel-good story alive.

The Flying Dutchmen are a team that has no trouble piling up runs, evident by the 13 games in which they scored double-digit runs this season, and last weekend they demonstrated their explosiveness.

Manchester had 15 hits in a 14-0 beat-down of Grass Lake in the district championship game and it should be noted that during the Cascades Conference season, Manchester scored 15 runs against Napoleon, a team gave up a total of three runs to the rest of the conference.

With that in mind, Alvarez said it is essential that senior pitching ace Kelsey Aemisegger gets off to a good start.

“Kelsey is the kind of pitcher, where she has to have that good start, she has to believe that her team is going to play well behind her defensively,” he said. “If she gets the feeling like what’s the sense in pitching the ball if I don’t have a defense behind me, that’s when she falls apart and she tends to lose her focus and her confidence.”

Last weekend Aemisegger had a good start coupled with a great finish in the Comets’  semifinals victory over Hillsdale.

She struck out 14 Hornet batters and allowed just two hits in a 5-1 win.

Alvarez said he needs more of the same production and leadership from Aemisegger for his girls to have their best shot at advancing.

“Kelsey’s probably going to be our horse the rest of the way out. Our team knows that Kelsey is the horse on the team,” he said. “I’ve used that to try to get Kelsey’s mind in the right place — I tell her all the time that she is the senior and this is what she wants. I tell her however she responds the team responds, so I need her to step up and be a leader.”

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