St. Mary’s softball team looking to go the distance

The high school softball season can last 90 days, but it’s getting maximum bang for your buck that’s the challenge.The St. Mary’s High softball team is on a mission to get its “money’s” worth, which in this case means staying alive until the state final on Saturday.”It’s a 90-day season and we’re on day 86,” St. Mary’s coach Colleen Newbury said Tuesday. “That’s not bad.”The Spartans’ next challenge is to get past South sectional champion Cohasset in the state semifinal today at Taunton High School (5). The winner of that game advances to the state final Saturday in Worcester.St. Mary’s only lost two starters from last year’s team, which won the Division 3 North title, so expectations of another good season were high this year. The Spartans got off to a great start, but they encountered a few bumps in the road as they hit the homestretch of the regular season. They lost six out of seven games, with a win over Swampscott in the consolation game of the Holland Tournament putting an end to the skid.However, it was the team’s 3-2 win over a tough Shawsheen opponent in the first round of the tournament that really turned things around. As the team celebrated the victory, Newbury said she remembers thinking that the team was back to where it should be.When things were going bad, Newbury said there wasn’t a sense that the Spartans were playing as a team. That’s no longer the case.”Now they’re into being a team. It’s about the team,” she said. “I think the kids realized we didn’t have a choice. We could come together and work as a team, or we would be done.”Newbury got a chance to scout Cohasset over the weekend, and she’s expecting her team to face a good pitcher in junior Kelly Naegelin, who’s also a threat at the plate.”She spots her pitches. It seems like she has a decent curveball and maybe a drop of some sort,” Newbury said, adding that Cohasset seems to be a lot like St. Mary’s in that it has good pitching and a good defense.Newbury said the one thing that has changed since the rough stretch late in the season is that the team seems to be getting the timely hits.”We’ve been getting the big hit with two outs, which we weren’t getting during the season,” she said.The Spartan pitching duo of Vanessa LaFauci and Sam Kiley has also been getting the job done. LaFauci has been getting the start with Kiley coming on in relief.The road to the state semifinal hasn’t been an easy one. After a 15-0 win over Lowell Catholic, things got a lot tougher. St. Mary’s squeezed by Shawsheen, 3-2, and beat Ipswich, 6-2. Catholic Central League foe Austin Prep, a team the Spartans split with during the regular season, put up a fight in the North final, but the Spartans came out on top, 6-2.”Realistically, looking back, that was a really tough bracket,” Newbury said. “We had to make it through a lot of good teams.”