Sports

Sioux softball primed for second season

By Tyler Ohmann

04/09/2013

The Westhope-Newburg-Bottineau (WNB) girls softball team hopes to reach new heights in 2013 thanks to a couple welcome additions—new equipment and a few new players from Bottineau.

WNB hopes to kick off their season today on the turf at Minot State, and then hope to get a pair of games in this weekend in Grafton.

They feel prepared to play thanks to a newly acquired indoor batting cage and pitching machine.

“Our community has been really great and they donated a lot to get us a pitching machine and indoor batting cage,” said WNB head coach Layne Fluhrer. “We’ve been able to hit and use our gym, because softball is the only spring sport, and it’s helped tremendously.”

Senior Rylee Lodoen echoes her coaches sentiments about the new equipment.

“We have a batting cage this year with a pitching machine, so we’ve been doing a lot of live hitting, which I think has helped us a lot,” Lodoen said.

The consistency and variety of pitch speeds are what make the pitching machine in particular so valuable.

“Whether it would be a coach pitching or a pitcher, we didn’t pitch a lot of strikes, so they didn’t get to hit as many,” Fluhrer said. “Now we have a pitching machine, where every pitch is a strike, so now they get to a lot more swings and get a lot more comfortable, and see changes in speeds.”

Another big positive for the program, which is in it’s second year of existence is the addition of three Bottineau players to their roster. Sophomore Jacie Ceglowski and freshmen Shelby Grenier and Paige Vad have joined the softball team and hope to foster some in-squad competition.

“We didn’t graduate anyone, so that’s the big thing,” Fluhrer said. “And with adding Bottineau now, that adds a lot more competition, so that girls that were comfortable now have to work for a spot, instead of it just being given to them.”

Both Lodoen and Fluhrer agree that pitching and hitting will be a strong suit for WNB this season as junior Ashlyn Huber will be their ace on the mound.

“We return our pitcher Ashlyn Huber and at the end of the year at regionals she really started to find it,” Fluhrer said. “She worked on it all winter and she’s way ahead of where we were last year, so pitching strikes will be a major plus.”

“Our pitching and hitting definitely are going to be up,” Lodoen said.

They also both agree that fielding will need to be improved.

“Being accurate with our throwing will definitely trouble us, but our pitching is 110 times better now than it was last year at this time,” Lodoen said. “Since we’ve been inside, we haven’t had practice doing high pop flies or long tosses.”

“Last year we hit the ball, but fielding and pitching is where we struggled, so now that we have our pitching fixed, and now if we get outside we can get our fielding fixed,” Fluhrer said.

WNB, along with most sports teams in the area, have been confined to mostly indoor practices, although improving weather conditions have allowed them to be outside a little bit.

“We’ve gone outside a few times in the last week,” said senior Ashley Ryan.

Four seniors return for WNB including Lodoen, Ryan, Hadlee Schell and Becca Christenson.

“We have a lot of people that are back. We didn’t have any seniors last year,” Lodoen said. “That makes people a lot more comfortable than they were last year.”

“There are four seniors this year and we’ve played together since peewee basketball, so it helps a lot,” Lodoen added.

That batch of senior leadership hopes to teach the younger members, despite not having much experience with the game themselves.

“We try to help them out,” Ryan said. “We do as much as we can.”

As far as goals, they are pretty lofty—advance to state.

That will be no easy task with two teams in the top four in state in their region as well as five other teams, including two new teams in the Class B’s North Region in Central McLean and Watford City.
Fluhrer said that Grafton and Thompson will again be tough this year after third and fourth place finishes at state. However, opponents Kenmare and Des Lacs-Burlington will be great competition for the Sioux.

“We played with them at the end of last year, and though we didn’t beat them, we were at least in the game,” Fluhrer said. “This year, with not graduating anyone, we should be right there.”

With that in mind WNB hopes to advance to state this season by finishing in the top four in their region.

“I told the girls that we’re planning on going to state this year, and that’s our goal,” Fluhrer said. “I honestly believe we can beat some of those teams in our area that we gave a run last year.”

Most of all though WNB’s girls hope to take a page out of Cyndi Lauper’s book and the “girls just want to have fun.”

"We knew we wouldn’t go to the state championship,” Lodoen said about last season, the team’s first ever playing the sport. “That took the pressure off, and even when it was raining and windy and cold everybody was still laughing, joking around and having fun with each other.”

Ryan believes the sport is enjoyable as well.

“It’s fun,” Ryan said. “We have a lot of good times.”

The most fun thing for Fluhrer is to see improvement in the players and team.

“It will be fun, and fun to see how much we’ve gotten better,” Fluhrer said.