The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Wickliffe falls to mighty Champion
Blue Devils appreciate fruits of 16-3 season
Laylah Ruscin wiped the tears from her eyes as she glanced at her teammates one last time before saying goodbye to her high school softball career.
Ruscin and her Wickliffe teammates had just been soundly defeated by stateranked Champion, 15-0, in a five-inning district semifinal at LaBrae. The finality of the season, coming at the hands of a Champion team that clubbed four home runs and got a perfect game from sophomore pitching phenom Gabby Gradishar.
But through it all, Ruscin counted blessings.
Four years prior, Ruscin and her teammates had their freshman season wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic. A year ago, the Wickliffe program gutted through a rare losing (8-10) season.
So in the whole grand scheme of things, as much as the two-touchdown loss to Champion hurt, there was solace to be taken in the Blue Devils’ 16-3 season — which included an undefeated jaunt through the CVC Valley Division.
“We had to switch a lot of things up (after last year),” Ruscin said. “I knew it was going to be hard. But we pulled it together and we did it. I’m very proud.”
So is Coach Marlana Mucciarone. After having no season at all in 2020 and a losing record (only her second in 10 years at the helm) last season, the Blue Devils got to the district tournament.
They just ran into a buzzsaw in this trip to the district level.
“The best pitcher we’ve faced in my 10 years of coaching,” Mucciarone said of Gradishar, the grandniece of former Ohio State All-American linebacker and NFL all-pro Randy Gradishar. “There’s little you can do when you face a player like that.”
Not that Mucciarone didn’t try. At practice a day earlier, the Wickliffe coach turned the pitching machine up as fast as it would go — 70 mph — to try and emulate Gradishar’s pitching.
It didn’t matter. Gradishar, who entered the game with a 14-3 record, 0.76 ERA and 190 strikeouts in 101 innings, threw her second perfect game of the season with 10 strikeouts. Two Wickliffe bunts were fielded at third base, two bunts were popped up to the catcher, and only Mackenzie Gazdak’s fourthinning grounder to second made it past Gradishar on the mound.
Offensively, Champion was a hammer house. The Golden Flashes hit four home runs, including Gradishar hitting her 17th bomb of the year, to go with seven doubles and a triple.
“That’s an excellent team,” Mucciarone said. “A very formidable opponent.”
But rather than focus on the game at hand, Mucciarone and her team discussed their succesful season in the postgame huddle.
“I just told them how proud I am, regardless of what just happened in the game,” Mucciarone said. “To go from 8-10 last year to a 16-3 team and be undefeated conference champs and sectional champs … the improvement they’ve made, especially Laylah and her class of seniors … their freshman season was destroyed by COVID and the three years after they just got better, better and better.”
Mucciarone said the team set goals prior to the season, which included a league title and a tournament run. The tournament run Mucciarone wants — for her team to get to the district final for the first time in her tenure — is still out there. But she said the experience against Coach Cheryl Weaver’s juggernaut of a program will serve as a learning experience for the future.
“We’ll come back here next year and know that we can play with any team,” she said. “We’ve got to keep our heads up and play like we know we can.
“My goal as a coach is I want to make it to the district final game. I’ve never been there. We were almost there. We just had this opponent that we couldn’t surmount.”