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CommunityNorthern wins a stunner
Schmeiser, Patriots topple three-time titlists; advance to final
Friday, May 16, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by DARWIN WEIGEL
Northern celebrates its 3-0 win over three-time 3A state champion Huntingtown. The Patriots won two of three games against their county rivals this season.
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Northern softball players smiled and high-fived each other and those still on the bench stood and screamed for just one more out. Even when a Patriots outfielder just missed making a diving catch, she still bounded up and exchanged grins with her teammate in center field.
The emotions in the Huntingtown dugout were decidedly different. The Hurricanes seemed stunned for the most part and, though they cheered on their teammate at the plate, most knew it was just a matter of time.
Moments later, Northern second baseman Abby Orlandi scooped up a dribbler and tossed it to first base to complete a stunning 3-0 win over host Huntingtown, the defending SMAC and three-time state champion in the 3A South regional semifinals Wednesday.
‘‘About our next game,” Northern coach Robert Radford said with a laugh when asked what was going through his mind. ‘‘It’s a sweet win. They’re a good team, but we’re a good team as well. But yeah, this is a huge win; you can’t get any bigger than this.”
‘‘I knew we could do it and I’m very excited that we did it,” said Northern third baseman Amanda Aikin. ‘‘We had a 50-50 chance and we came out and did it. It’s just awesome.”
Shortstop Julie Orlandi said of the final play: ‘‘I’m thinking, ‘Let’s just make the play. It’s a routine ball, we should be done.’ Then I was happy.”
Aikin had the same thoughts: ‘‘It was a slow roller so it kind of scared me, but Abby came up and got it, and I thought, ‘It’s good,’ then I just screamed really loud.”
The win was Northern’s second over the Hurricanes this season after a 7-5 decision on March 3. The Hurricanes won 3-1 on April 23.
‘‘[The regular season win] was a big boost, but we weren’t going to let that get in our heads because they beat us later on,” Orlandi said. ‘‘We had the impression they thought it was probably a fluke and we wanted to prove to them that it wasn’t.”
The fourth-seeded Patriots (13-7) will travel to face third-seeded La Plata for the regional championship game, scheduled for 4 p.m. today.
For the first time since he accepted the head coaching job in the fall of 2004, Coach Mike Johnson and the Hurricanes (18-2) will not win a state championship.
‘‘I’m just stunned and disappointed that we as a team and we as a coaching staff didn’t bring our ‘A’ game out on the field today,” said Johnson, who admitted he wouldn’t sleep that night and would replay every pitch, every play in his mind. ‘‘My hat’s off to Northern for the way they played; they played just about as well as a team can play and that’s what we expect teams to do against us. But we didn’t step up; we depended on everyone else to step up and take the lead role for us.”
Northern earned its berth into the final with fundamentals, something Radford has preached since he took over as coach in 2005.
‘‘We’ve stressed that every year,” Radford said. ‘‘And when we’ve won [it’s been because we played fundamentally sound] and when we didn’t it was because we didn’t execute.”
Kaitlyn Schmeiser threw a complete game four-hitter. The freshman struck out four and walked one.
‘‘Becca [Sanders] was our ace at the beginning of the season and Kaitlyn was our freshman so our goal all season as to bring her along slowly,” Radford said. ‘‘Becca’s the veteran, she’s won us a lot of games, but we’ve worked [Schmeiser] in and as we got farther she got more and more comfortable with the defense, and this is what we wanted her to be.”
Schmeiser threw 82 pitches, 53 of them for strikes, and was ahead in the count for all but six batters.
‘‘Basically I just tried to stay in the strike zone and be smart with batters,” said Schmeiser, who tried not throw the same pitch twice in a row. ‘‘[Catcher Kristin] Schalk did a wonderful, amazing job of calling pitches, because we didn’t want to give them too many strikes that were easy to hit. We also wanted to keep them on the corners and on their toes so I tried to jam them up.”
‘‘She’s always around the plate,” Radford said. ‘‘She can throw pretty well and now we have Becca as a backup. I have to say that at the beginning of the year we planned for this day and it worked out great.”
Orlandi added: ‘‘[Schmeiser] pitched a fantastic game. If it wasn’t for her, we might have had home runs hit off of us every inning.”
The Patriots struck in the first inning when Chelsea Stern slapped a one-out single and scored on Schmeiser’s double down the left field line.
‘‘She makes so many things happen,” Radford said of Stern, ‘‘that she puts so much pressure on the defense.”
Northern all but put the game away in the sixth inning on Caitlin Keppler’s run-scoring bunt single and Orlandi’s sacrifice fly.
Huntingtown had a chance when Jessica Warner led off the fourth with a double. Jordon DeGennaro followed with a bouncer to Julie Orlandi. The shortstop gunned the throw to second to get Warner.
‘‘She was taking big leads on the previous pitches,” Orlandi said, ‘‘so I knew she was going to be pretty far off.”
The Hurricanes had another chance to get on the board in the fifth inning.
Stueckler led off with a walk, stole second and went to third on Ashley Dorr’s groundout. But Schalk gunned a throw to third baseman Aikin third to picked off Stueckler and end the inning.
‘‘She was pretty far [down the line], so I knew we had her,” Aikin said.
‘‘I think, and I hope everyone from both sides, would agree with and recognize, that Huntingtown softball does not usually play that type of game,” Johnson said of the base running blunders. ‘‘Obviously they weren’t focused enough because you don’t make mistakes when you are focused. But at the same time we wanted to score a run so bad that we took ourselves out of position to score those runs.”
‘‘We always seem to be matched up with them, and we always look at it that it’s going to be a good game and maybe a tough win,” Orlandi said. ‘‘We just prepare ourselves for it and treat it like any other game, you know? We’re not scared of the blue and black.”
