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hat a team! What a season! What a finish! The Southmoore Sabercats won their third Fast-Pitch Softball State Championship in the last eight years but it wasn’t an easy task as each of their three final games went right down to the last inning. Head Coach Jason Lingo said it was unlike anything he has ever been a part of as a coach. “It was an amazing weekend,” Lingo said. “I’ve been coaching for a long time in a lot of different sports. I’ve never been involved in three last second games or last inning cliff-hangers like that, much less in the state tournament for a state championship. It was insane.”
36 November 2020
BY: STEVE MARSHALL
The tournament began on Thursday when the Sabercats had to rally from a 5-0 deficit against Jenks. Southmoore chipped away at the lead and trailed by one run headed into the seventh inning. Then the Cardiac Cats took over. ‘Things did not start our way and I’ll give our kids credit,” Lingo said. “They’re not going to stop fighting. We’re down 5-0 to Jenks. Three of the five were unearned runs. Usually we have done a great job of pitching it and catching it. Our offense at times has been up and down like a roller coaster. But we could always count on pitching and defense to be there for us all the time. We made a few errors, gave up a few runs but we settled
down. The kids didn’t give up and we clawed our way back into it.” Then, in the seventh inning. still trailing by a run with one out, the Cats got a home run from freshman Rylee Fanning to tie the game at 6-6. “At that point we’re thinking great, awesome, unbelievable, now maybe we have a chance to go into extra innings and win it,” Lingo said. Riley Sharp made sure that didn’t happen as she put one over the fence in left field to give Southmoore a 7-6 lead and the eventual win to advance. Then in the semifinals on Friday, the Cardiac Cats had to score late again after getting just one hit in the first six innings to defeat Deer Creek 2-1.
