By Luke Loftus The Johnstown Breeze
2025-10-30 06:00 AM
The Lady Rough Riders achieved one of their goals of the season, making it to the Sweet 16 of the state softball tournament last Friday. Their opponent was the Windsor Wizards, the number one overall seed in the whole state.
Coach Vince Moreno and the team knew defeating Windsor would be no small feat.
“I felt we had a good week of preparation in practice, we knew the Windsor pitcher would throw hard so we prepared, had a couple days of live pitching and worked on bunting as we knew that would be our only chance to produce runs,” he said.
Going into the game, Coach Moreno had a small ball type approach to this one. And to defeat a pitcher you know is tough to make contact with, producing your own runs, and applying pressure to their defense, is a great strategy to go with.
After the first two innings of the game, the score was still 0-0. Pitchers on both sides were pitching well. The Wizards would break the tie, however, scoring two in the bottom half of the third inning. Windsor would then blank the Riders in the top of the fourth inning and add two more runs in the bottom of the inning, making the score 0-4.
Unfortunately, the game would end at that score. The Windsor pitcher threw a complete game, a no-hitter. She only had five strikeouts, and the Windsor defense only had one error.
The Riders had Kenzie Maddox start in the circle. She went three innings and allowed two runs. Then sophomore Lexi Arave came in in the bottom of the fourth and finished out the game, allowing two runs, only one of them being earned.
“All year we asked our pitchers just to keep us in the games. Today both pitchers did that,” Coach Moreno said about Maddox and Arave. “I am super proud of Kenzie and Lexi for going out and pitching the way they did.”
Windsor would go all the way to the finals and lose 4-7 to Holy Family.
It is obviously not the outcome of season they all wanted, but all in all they had a great season and nothing to hang their heads about. Coach Moreno said of his team, “I told the girls, yes be proud of making it to state, the final 16 teams in 4A. That should be our goal every year. Our next goal is to win our first-round matchup and get to Elite 8 and make it to the Final Four on Saturday. I am happy for our seniors, and we are going to miss those six seniors. Looking back at our season, we went 17-10 for the year. That is a great season for us, 12-4 in the league. The teams that finished above us in the league were all part of the final 16 as well. We have a lot to be proud of this year, and we want this season to be a steppingstone to next year. We lose six key contributors, but I feel we have the underclassmen who can step in and get us back here next year. We have our two pitchers coming back, freshmen who got some time up at the varsity level to gain some experience.”