Chris Ferrick-Manley
Staff Reporter
The McDaniel Green Terror Softball team (9-6, 0-0 Centennial Conference) aspires to get back into the conference playoffs after falling short each of the last two years.
Head Coach Phil Smith has a young team that graduated four “top notch” seniors after last season. According to Smith, this year’s version will rely heavily on freshmen and sophomores.
“I think they’re so young that they don’t know any better,” said Smith, “when you get an older team they start thinking too much.”
Smith believes that the first part of the season, before conference play, is especially crucial to transitioning a young team to the speed of college play. He also believes that the pitching and defense should be stronger this year than in last season.
“The goal is to into the Centennial Conference playoffs and let things shake out from there,” said Smith, “I think the seniors are a little bit hungry because the seniors have been there before.”
The Terror will have a tough road to the Centennial playoffs. According to Smith, the CC is one of the toughest DIII softball conferences is the nation. Among the players who Smith is counting on this season are junior pitcher Christy Morley, who “matured a lot over the last two seasons”, according to Smith, Junior 2B/SS Lauren Toomey, and Senior OF Kelli Workmeister.
“In years past we’ve had four or five people be key players but this year we have more all around players,” said Toomey.
The Green Terror was ranked sixth in the preseason coaches poll. According to Toomey however, the preseason ranking does not tell the truth about how good the team really is. Toomey believes that that they will finish in the top four in the conference and return to the conference tournament.
“No ones expecting us to do anything so I think that will come back to hurt everyone in our conference,” said Workmeister.
Teams expected to be near the top of the Centennial standings this year include Haverford, and Gettysburg, and defending champion Ursinus. According to Workmeister, every team in the conference is good enough that the Terror can not afford to have off days.
“We can’t ever go into a game lightly,” said Toomey.
Sam Reigel, a pitcher on the softball team, believes that the Terror will have the ability to be competitive against all of the top teams in the CC.
“We will hold our own against the tougher teams,” said Reigel, “Coach Phil has a lot of confidence in us, we need to sacrifice time to fulfill potential.”
Reigel credits the team’s early success; they finished last season in 5th place (13-23, 7-9 CC) but well behind 4th place, to a better team attitude.
“By staying positive you have more fun too,” said Reigel.
The next home game for the Green Terror is April 14 against the Dickinson Red Devils. Game time is 3:30pm.