It took nearly an entire season before the #1 Lee-Davis softball team had the opportunity to face off against their most potent county challenger, #3 Patrick Henry. It was one of the most anticipated regular season regional softball games and one that fans started looking forward to at the close of last season.
  The two teams arrived at Lee-Davis’ softball field on a combined 28-game winning streak. The lone loss between the pair came in Patrick Henry’s opening game of the season. Lee-Davis last loss was in the 2010 State Championship game. Both teams returned nearly their entire lineups from a season ago and fielded two of the top three pitchers in the region, if not the state.

  The final score of 1-0 was on par with expectations. The Patriots walking away with the win was not.

  While Patrick Henry head coach Matt Crowder was pleased with the victory, he did not come to Lee-Davis with a realistic expectation of accomplishing the feat. In fact, he attempted to downplay the game’s importance, pointing out to his players that other than pride, little was at stake between the two teams. The only contest against Lee-Davis that was important to Crowder, was if the two met again in the regionals.

  But Patriot catcher Madison Gilman pointed out that the challenge for the players was to balance desire with practicality. “We wanted to win it pretty bad, but we were just saying, come at it the same as always and if we win that’s good, if we lose- we were sort of expected to lose, since we were #3 and they were #1.”

  So, were they Patriots effective at downplaying their emotions?

  “No not at all,” Gilman laughed. “We definitely wanted to win.”

  Crowder also laughed off his attempt to de-emphasize the game. “Really for them, I can tell them all I wanted to, ‘Hey this game’s not that important in the long run’, but it didn’t matter what I said. They had a lot of emotion in this game tonight.”

  On the other hand, Lee-Davis head coach Jackie Davis wanted the win to continue her team’s momentum. But if anything, hers was the team that lacked emotion.

  “My girls came in as flat as can be,” Davis said. “They just expected all we’ve got to do is show up.”

  So despite the loss, the Confederates came away with a lesson that will help them down the road. “They learned now that it’s not like that,” Davis said. “You’ve got to come out and play. You’ve got to come out and play hard. We tried to turn it on in the seventh inning but by then it’s too late.

  “I think you can always learn from a loss,” Davis said. “I think it is going to help us refocus in practice and be a little more disciplined. I hate the fact that we have to lose a game for that to happen. Now maybe some of the ones that we were trying get to do some different things at the plate, will work a little bit harder on that. Now they see, one mistake defensively can lose a game for you.

  “We’ve been harping on defense,” Davis said. “My philosophy has always been, offense will win you games but defense will win you championships and if we play defense the way we did tonight… Hopefully we learned what we needed to tonight. They’re pretty smart girls. They’ll get out of it what they need to.”

  For Patrick Henry, the late-season victory over an undefeated and top-ranked team puts them back on the radar after many wrote them off following their season opening loss.

  “It feels really good because I feel like no one thought we were really going to pull through this, but it’s nice to know that we can,” Gilman said.
  But the biggest winner of the night was the large crowd of softball fans that filled both bleachers and sidelines to see the contest come down to the final play.

  “People got their money’s worth out of this one,” Crowder said.