Bulldogs fall to underdog Cavaliers

The season ended Thursday for the Bulldogs who lost 6-1 to the underdog Chillicothe Cavaliers in the first round of the OHSSA Softball Playoffs.

This was a tough loss for the favored Athens team after an emotional game. The Bulldogs were a number one seed playing the number 8 seed Cavs. Coach Sheila Ross commented on the pressure the girls may have felt.

“When you’re coming into a game where you’re supposed to win and things start off slow you do feel more pressure and when someone is expected to win, you got a little weight on your shoulders,” she said.

The start of the game seemed to be a match of pitchers with both Jayne Seymour for Athens and Rylee Boullion for Chillicothe pitching three and out.

But the bats proved stronger for Chillicothe which scored two runs in the second inning from Kali Kight and Page Rinehart, both sophomores.

The Chillicothe team is in fact a very young team with only one senior, first baseman Holly LeMay. LeMay made a game changing play at first. With the tying runs for Athens on first and second, two outs and Seymour up to bat, she made an acrobatic behind the back, upside down, twisted catch to get the third out.

At this point something changed for the Bulldogs.

“I thought we would be able to score two right then,” Ross said. “That would have changed the ball game right there and at that point our experience would have been a little different.”

On the flip side, Greg Philips, coach of the Cavaliers, was rather thrilled with the catch.

“That’s the game right there,” he said, noting that if the game had been tied up at that point, the outcome could have been different.

He was not so surprised, however, by the play from the lone senior.

“She is our one senior and I expect that from her,” he said.

LeMay was pretty pleased herself with the play.

“It felt really good,” she said.

She also expects that things will be a little different when the team returns to school tomorrow.

“We had a lot of people not have faith in us and they believed that we weren’t going to win and it's just going to be crazy,” she laughed.

But the Cavs have not always had such great success and people truly have been less than impressed by the team.

Philips has only coached the team for two years but has worked very hard to point the team in the right direction but he had quite the challenge ahead of him.

Out of the last one hundred games the Cavs had only won three. Their record going into this playoff game was only 9-17. It is a team with nine freshmen and sophomores on a roster of 11; the odds seem to be against them. But as Philips plainly put it: “They believe.”

They are not a team with unrealistic expectations, though.

“We didn’t have expectations except that we were going to play hard and get this program headed in the right direction,” Philips said.

Now people might be paying attention to the underdog Cavs and that’s just what Philips is hoping for.

“We’ve sent a good message and we will see how far we can ride this train,” he said.