Pennsbury leads area teams set for Pennsylvania districts
With two rounds of the New Jersey state softball tournament already in the books, now it’s time to get the Pennsylvania districts underway next week.
Four area teams have received No. 1 seeds, starting with Pennsbury in the District 1 Class 6A field. The Falcons (19-1) secured the top spot on Wednesday when they finished the regular season with an exciting 4-2 victory over Neshaminy on Taylor Askey’s walk-off home run.
It marked the seventh straight time Pennsbury beat Neshaminy and senior pitcher Kennedie Ruth, which really is impressive when you consider the strength of the Redskin program and the fact Ruth is a returning allarea player.
Hopefully, as far as Pennsbury is concerned, it will have the services of senior pitcher Ainsley McClure after she missed the Neshaminy game with a concussion that she suffered playing volleyball in gym class.
How a star varsity player could be exposed this way in gym class is a little hard to understand, but that’s another topic of discussion for another day.
The 24-team District 1 6A tournament is always one of the highlights of the season because it’s a loaded up a field with quality teams from a huge geographical area that runs from the Delaware River to the Lancaster County border.
Following the No. 1 Falcons in the seeding are No. 2 Spring-Ford (18-0), defending state champion and No. 3 North Penn (191) and No. 4 Haverford (200), which beat Pennsbury in last year’s state semifinal.
Also qualifying from the area in 6A were No. 17 Bensalem, No. 21 Council Rock South and No. 11 Neshaminy.
Led by capable senior pitcher Maggie Formichelli, Bensalem is having one of its best seasons with 13 wins already secured and will open at home against Coatesville. Should they win, the Owls will advance to a round-of-16 game at Pennsbury.
Under the guidance of former Bensalem coach Dan Scrham, a very young Rock South team will open at Downingtown East and Neshaminy will host Perkiomen Valley on Monday with the winner getting Hatboro-Horsham.
Despite the losses to Pennsbury, don’t count Neshaminy out. The Redskins were in the same basic position a year ago and then put together a tremendous district run with four straight wins before coming up short in the final.
It all adds up to another outstanding tournament, and you can be sure the survivors will make a major impact when the Pennsylvania
state tournament gets underway in June.
Also receiving top seeds were Villa Joe Marie in District 1 Class 4A, Bristol in District 1 Class 2A and Conwell-Egan in District 12 Class 2A. All three are defending champions. Villa Joe’s stiffest competition may very well come from Gwynedd-Mercy, which has split two games with the Jems this year.
Prior to district play, Conwell-Egan will also compete in the Philadelphia Catholic League championship game on Monday against Archbishop Wood at Neumann University. Considering Conwell-Egan and Wood are both Lower Bucks schools, holding the final in Delaware County is totally ridiculous.
Surely they could have found a field more conveniently located, and holding the game at a location south of the Philadelphia Airport shows no consideration to the fans, especially with the current gasoline prices.
BURLINGTON RISING
Keeping in mind this article was written prior to Friday’s New Jersey state tournament games being played, one plus for the area has been the reemergence of Burlington County softball.
Obviously, what No. 2 Bordentown has done speaks for itself, but there are a bunch of other Burlco teams that have become part of the playoff picture no matter what happened in Friday’s games.
Northern Burlington and Delran have already advanced to Tuesday’s sectionals semifinals, while Burlington Township, Rancocas
Valley, Seneca and Lenape were attempting to do the same on Friday afternoon. There’s also a huge BCSL presence in the Central Jersey Group I bracket with Florence, New Egypt and Burlington City to have played quarterfinals on Friday.
This is a marked improvement for Burlington teams compared to last year.
As for Colonial Valley Conference teams, four were still alive and kicking heading into Friday’s play. Those clubs included an Allentown team playing at Robbinsville and Steinert hosting Freehold Boro. Remarkably, Steinert has reached the sectional finals eight straight times.
Notre Dame is also going strong and will host Paul VI Monday. Should they win, the Irish will in all probability head to the state’s top-ranked Donovan Catholic later next week.
It’s been a long time since Mercer County failed to produce at least one state champion each year, and although it will be difficult
this time around, it has some teams with a fighting chance.
STAT OF WEEK
From covering softball it became very apparent long ago you often can’t trust the statistics teams will give you about their players.
To name just a couple of ways of how the stats can be bogus, passed balls and wild pitches become stolen bases and a fielder’s choice is scored as a base hit. Another common error “mistake” is giving players doubles after they single and advance on a throw to another base.
Anyway, the reason we bring this up is a reader stumbled upon a classic this week on MaxPreps. According to that website, a player on the Science Leadership Academy team of Philadelphia is batting .955 with 42 hits in 44 bats.
Yes, you read that right. The player has supposedly collected 42 hits while making only two outs.
One of two things is going on here.
Either every big-time college program in the country should try to recruit this incredible player, or this is one of the most egregious examples of phony stats in the history of the sport.