Caroline McSHerry
Contributing Writer
Over this past Spring Break, the KSC softball team traveled to Clermont, Florida to play at the Legends Way Ballfields at the National Training Center.
This year’s tournament hosted over 310 colleges and universities from across the country.
The Spring Games Tournament is open to all divisions and gives teams a chance to kick-start their season after a long winter of preparation. Our team’s journey began at 2:45 a.m. on Saturday, March 14, as we loaded all of our gear onto the buses to head to the airport.
Upon our arrival at the Orlando Airport, the team packed into two separate vans and drove to the place we would be staying for the next week. This year our team was split up into two houses that were about a 10 minute drive from the fields.
Only a short time after arriving at the houses, we were changed and ready to go have a short practice at a nearby field in order to get warmed up for our season openers the following day.
Our first day of games brought lots of excitement and jitters, as we were going against two of the best teams in the country.
COntributed photo / Caroline McSherry
One of those teams was Tufts University, who won back-to-back national championships in 2013 and 2014.
Our team ended up falling to both teams that day, but we knew what needed to be worked on and were ready to come back the next day for some more competition. Throughout the week our coach was constantly switching up positions to see how players (especially the rookies) handled different situations.
We have eight rookies this year, so it was awesome to see what some of them could do and how they will benefit our team this season.
Though our schedule consisted of 12 games, we still had time to do some team bonding.
On Wednesday the team had the day off, so we chose to spend the day at Typhoon Lagoon Water Park. We plummeted down water slides and relaxed while floating down the lazy river. On our last day at the tournament we went 1-1, winning our final game against Chicago.
Our final record for the week was 5-7, which we were pretty happy with.
All together, I think we showed what Keene State Softball could do on the field, and we’re excited to begin our regular season against Springfield College on Wednesday.
