The Season is Over

The season is finally over and what a season it was. For me it started out with a decision early this spring to go back and play softball with a bunch of friends and just simply go have fun. For years I was putting teams on the field with full intention of winning a championship. The Championship never came. I had a half of a dozen years over the last 20 or so years where we were the regular season champions, only to tank it in the playoffs.

This year I just wanted to go back and have fun, and oh what fun we had. The regular season saw a 16-3 record and winning a lot of close games. We finished in second place, which was nice. Like I said I had a half dozen or so regular season Championships, although BOPARC just started awarding trophies for the regular season either this year or last year. So, it was nice to be awarded the second place regular season trophy.

The excitement however would remind you of the 2005 mountaineer Basketball team by the time playoffs came around. At the end of the regular season the team had actually hit a little bit of a slump, and we fell behind 0-15 in our last regular season game. We did however manage to fight back and win that game.

A little background, I have played softball at BOPARC 20 some odd years in both summer and fall leagues. The old Sterling Faucet team I played on made it to the Championships one year, but lost both games. It was the last time I had ever made it to the Championship round, despite playing on some very good teams with some pretty remarkable talent through the years.

This year, I really thought that it would be another typical year and we would go two and out and be done in the playoffs. We won our first game and lost our second game Monday night to a team of Morgantown City Police Officers, this dropped us over to the losers bracket. One more loss and we would be done. Last night we had a 6:00 game that we managed to come back from 5 runs down in the bottom off the last inning to win and move to the next round, which was late last night. At the 9:30 game last night we rallied in the bottom of the last inning to push the game into extra innings, and managed to win it in the bottom of the 8th inning to move to the consolation round finals.

tonight we had an 8:30 game against a team that just hammered us during the regular season and were a very tough team to beat. We managed to return the favor and blow them out and advanced to the Championship round against the same team that put us in the losers bracket. This was my second time in all these years of making the finals, and this was the first time I made the finals in the ultra competitive summer league (a lot more teams play summer ball).

We lost a 4 run game giving Morgantown Honda the Championship, it was a very hard fought game and one that was great to have played in.

We managed to take not one, but two runner up trophies to our sponsor tonight. One for the regular season, and one for the post season.

It was a great year with a great group of guys. Our final record including playoffs was 20-5 and second place finishes in both the regular and post season.

All of this excitement came from me deciding to change teams and just go back and have fun this season. This was a great group of guys to be associated with, they never seem to quit or give up. No deficit was too big to rally to comeback to win. Hats off to both Chris and Paul for putting this team together and assembling a group of guys with some nice chemistry to play softball together. We may not have been the most intimidating team to look at, but we brought it to the field and played the game. We also managed to get our sponsor a couple nice pieces of hardware in the process.

For any of you who listen to WVAQ in the mornings in North Central West Virginia, we were the team that was being talked about in the Lower League Softball Reports. Helps to have a couple players on the air, maybe that's why there was a nice turnout for the championship tonight.

This has to be my fondest year playing a game that I have played over 20 years and love to play. Thanks to all my team mates, coaches, scorekeepers, and dedicated fans for making this a very special year to remember.