Is it finally Freedom’s time to win a championship?
Despite loss to Bethlehem Catholic, the Patriots are one of area’s best teams
As a health and physical education teacher at Freedom High School, Michele Laubach has witnessed the school enjoy a breakthrough in several sports in recent years.
The football team won its first District 11 championship in 2018. Earlier that year, the baseball team won its first district gold since 1999. The girls soccer team won its first district title in 2019. The boys basketball team won its first district title since 1976 in 2020.
It’s clearly a school on the rise in terms of athletic prominence and Laubach is friends with many of the coaches and knows many of the athletes who earned the championships.
But Freedom has never won a league or district title in softball and Laubach believes it’s time for her team to join the others as champions.
Despite losing for the first time this season Saturday, a 2-1 defeat to Bethlehem Catholic, Freedom has all of the talent and experience needed to make a championship charge. Among the Patriots’ early-season wins were a 10-1 rout of six-time defending district champ Parkland and a 2-1 victory over Emmaus, the same team that knocked the Patriots out of the 2019 District 11 tournament.
“It’s not a secret,” Laubach said of the fact that Freedom has never won a league or district crown. “We’re not hiding it from the girls. We’ve put it on the table and told the girls that they have an opportunity to make school history. I work with [Nick D’Amico] the baseball coach and he has his district championship banner in the gym. I say to our girls ‘Do you see a softball banner in this gym?’ I’m like ‘let’s go’ and I want them to be able to come back in this gym in five or 10 years and see their own championship banner.”
Freedom was rolling until the Becahi loss and now the challenge is to respond because, in a when Eastern Pennsylvania Conference teams are being affected by COVID-19 as much as each other, nothing is going to go completely smoothly.
The unique EPC schedule has each team playing the same divisional foe twice in a matter of days, and Freedom will get a second shot at the Golden Hawks on Monday.
“I’m hoping this loss motivates our team for Monday when we face them a second time on our turf,” Laubach said. “I told the girls ‘let’s win the week and that means we need to go 3-1.’ We already have the loss, so now we need to win out. We win together and we lose together and now they know it doesn’t feel good to lose.”
Later in the week, Freedom will have a home-and-home series with unbeaten Northampton.
Laubach and Konkrete Kids coach Kristy Henritzy are good friends and bonded last summer in working together to arrange a summer tournament that featured 16 schools.
Parkland won, but Northampton and Freedom both made it to the semifinals and got to show their ability.
Both Laubach and Henritzy deserve kudos from the softball community for arranging an event that wasn’t popular with many school administrations but meant so much to the players and their families. It allowed them to fill part of the void created by not having a spring season.
But when they meet Wednesday at Northampton and again Friday at Freedom, their teams will be going at it with championship intensity and trying to send a message about who is first in line to contend for league and district titles.
“We have 10 seniors and we have several who have started since their freshman years,” Laubach said. “We’ve talked about getting that first championship and this is their internal drive. As coaches, we can’t control what the kids think, but I believe that going for a championship is what keeps them focused and on the drive.”
Laubach said a big part of her job is to keep distractions on the outside.
“I played on a high school team at Central Columbia that won a state championship,” she said. “We won the league and districts every year. We had great coaching, great players and great chemistry. I know this team is capable of winning a league and district title, but one thing we can’t coach, teach or control is team chemistry. That’s so important. We’ve got to keep that on the right track and if we do, we can achieve our goals.”
Game of the week
Palmerton and Northwestern Lehigh have two of the best offenses in area softball and it showed in a 19-16 Blue Bombers win Saturday. Each team had 19 hits and Palmerton hit six home runs, including three by Kelsey Balliet. Balliet had four hits and drove in six runs overall. Morgan Farthing had four hits and scored three runs for the Tigers, who committed eight errors and suffered their first loss of the season.
Win of the week
Bethlehem Catholic’s win over Freedom was much needed for a Golden Hawks team that started 0-4 but was expected to be a contender in both the EPC Northampton County division and District 11 Class 4A. Rich Mazza’s team got four-hit pitching from Emma Bond and two hits and a run scored and RBI from four-year started Jaden Spigner. It will be interesting to see if the Golden Hawks can build off what should be a confidence-boosting win.
Dominick Vito Corpora
No one loves high school softball more than Jim Corpora, the Hall of Fame umpire and Eastern Pennsylvania Conference assignor. His father, lifelong Easton resident Dominick Vito Corpora, who helped to instill Jim’s love of softball, died last week at age 91.
“He was a huge sports enthusiast who loved playing and watching fastpitch softball,” Jim said.
The entire softball community sends out its condolences to the family.
Co-players of the week FREEDOM’S JEN SLANOVEC, ABBY HUSSER
One of the reasons Freedom is a favorite to win league and district titles is that the Patriots have not one, but two quality pitchers in seniors Abby Husser and Jen Slanovec. Especially when teams are playing opponents back-to-back, throwing someone different at them can be a key weapon.
“We talked to both of them about working together because if they do that, they’re going to be the biggest reason we go far,” Laubach said. “They need to have each other’s back and support one another. That’s what I wanted to see and that’s what I am seeing.”
Laubach also sees two girls who have worked hard to become the best players they can. Slanovec is headed to UMass-Lowell, and Husser is going to Goldey-Beacom College in Wilmington; both are members of successful travel team programs.
“I’ve seen the work both of these pitchers have put in,” Laubach said. “They have both improved tremendously from the last time we played in 2019 and I have 100% confidence in both of them. We had a lot of success in 2019 but just couldn’t come up with the big hit. All of the kids lost a season and they were waiting for this opportunity and now they have it.”
Slanovec is 2-1 with 10 hits, three earned runs allowed, and 33 strikeouts in 20 innings. Husser is 2-0 and has allowed just one hit in 19 innings with 19 strikeouts. Husser had a perfect game in a 19-0 win over Nazareth and is hitting .400 with six RBIs offensively.