ATHOL — The Athol High School softball team was in the same situation last year — after winning its first-round matchup in the Western Massachusetts Division II Softball Tournament, the Red Raiders will face Greenfield High School in the second round tonight at 6.
The two teams have squared-off five times in the last two years. Athol has won one of those games, but has been no-hit twice by Greenfield during that span.
The Red Raiders will have their hands full with the Green Wave, and if the team has any hope of winning, it’ll have to put its bats to good use, according to Athol coach Sharon Chauvette.
“We can hit. That’s going to be it,” said Chauvette. “If we can hit, we can play that game. I know we can. That’s the best we can do to prepare for Greenfield.”
The Red Raiders have practiced with the pitching machine the last several days in preparation for the Green Wave, which went 16-2 during the regular season and received a first-round bye as the No. 1 seed.
It’s no secret that the Green Wave has one of the best pitchers in western Massachusetts — if not one of the best pitchers in all of Massachusetts — in Olivia Joy, who has no-hit the Red Raiders twice in her career, just a couple of many noteworthy accomplishments the junior has to her name. This year alone, Joy has an 11-2 record, with 172 strikeouts in 92 innings (13 strikeouts per seven innings), a 1.14 ERA and 0.79 WHIP.
Offensively, Greenfield has some of the best hitters in western Massachusetts. Samantha Smith is an athlete who gets overshadowed at times, but she has nonetheless hit five home runs and comes into tonight’s game carrying a hefty batting average over .600.
Then, the Wave has Raegan Hickey, who hit three home runs and knocked in 14 runs, while Elizabeth Howland has hit two home runs and scored 11 times during the regular season. The trio has largely created a dominant Greenfield force even outside of the softball field for the entirety of the 2017-18 athletic season.
Not surprisingly, Athol’s eighth-grade duo of Lindsey Leblanc and Sadey Lehtomaki propelled the team to a 3-2 win over Palmer High School in the first round of the tournament. The Red Raiders have gotten everything they could ask for and then some out of Leblanc this season, with her latest contribution of a commanding mound win over the Panthers. Lehtomaki scored her team’s first run of that game and knocked in the winning run on a double as well. Lehtomaki has been everything the team could ask for at the plate, hitting toe-to-toe with leading hitter Haley Bigwood.
Yet, however good Lehtomaki hit during the regular season (23 runs, 25 RBIs, .325 batting average), Bigwood holds the premiere hitter status of Athol’s lineup, and if the team has any chance in defeating Greenfield, Bigwood will need to play a leading role. Bigwood had a slash line of .464/.565/.899 during the regular season with six home runs, 30 RBIs and 25 runs. Bigwood figures to hit like she always does, but she’ll need some help from her teammates.
When Lehtomaki has produced and others have pitched in, such as cleanup hitter Destiny Wrigley, recent graduate Amber Mahony and other surrounding cast, the Red Raiders have played like one of the better teams in the area.
But, like Chauvette said, if the bats go silent, things get dicey for the Red Raiders. In Thursday’s game alone, things looked bleak when the Red Raiders went down to begin the game. The team didn’t generate a hit until the fifth inning, but timely hitting bailed them out of a first-round exit.
If the Red Raiders’ bats are working, they can defeat anybody. But it takes the entire cast and everything else to fall into place. For the Red Raiders to defeat Greenfield, they will have to do just that.