Emily Cook and Rick Nester discussing strategy during the Conference 24 Championship game in 2015.

The landscape has changed over the past decade in regards to post season Softball in the Virginia High School League. The biggest difference being the elimination of most District / Conference tournaments ahead of Regional play. While Page County participated in one in 2025, Carroll County hasn’t played in one for a few years now as the Three Rivers District doesn’t hold them.

  The significance of this is the 27 games played and 26 victories collected have a legitimate chance at standing as CCHS school records for a really long time.

This season the number of regular season games allowed was bumped up from 20 to 21. This creates an opportunity to play in 27 games, 28 if you advance from a Regional tournament play-in game (7/10, 8/9).

There is no doubt about the fact that the Lady Cavaliers of 2015 captured the initial State Championship in school history. But at 26 wins, did the also set a school record for wins in a season ? Chances are that they did just that.

Carroll County allowed just five runs across the eight game post season, for an average of 0.625 runs per game. Even in the lone setback versus Woodgrove it was by a 2-0 margin.

Pitching and defense wins ball games and the Lady Cavaliers proved that in spades ♠️. We will take a look at each post season game in the magical run, not just the 1-0 Championship game. [Scoring 64 runs doesn’t hurt].

Another mark that might stand forever is the number of players on one team that would move on to play in College. Having three from the same team end up at one school (Ferrum College) might stand for quite some time as well.

  Thank you 🙏 to Craig Worrell for another capture from 2015 and to Donna Nester for finding the print out of the post season games.

The top photo shows the Wall as a whole while the lower one focuses on one of the players. Love the look !

  One other thing that was way cool was the back drop…

Happy 40th Anniversary to Rick and Donna Nester today, roughly five months after Lin and I celebrated the same.

  Relationships are a Big Part of the Softball story !

  One of the chapters in the book 📖 will be about the otherside of the diamond 💎, as Baseball has been part of the experience as well.

An eighteen year run 🏃‍♂️ alongside of Lawrence ” Big Picture ” Nesselrodt, a twelve year run with the Valley Baseball League, making the loop of the Major League Baseball stadiums 🏟 and the incredible ” Rookie ” season just completed by Casey Burcham at Carroll County High School  are a few of the topics in this part.

Being a minority owner of one of the top Summer League teams, owning a team outright for one season and creating another team in the same league will be highlighted.  Being a witness and minority contributor to the Super Man type efforts of Burcham and his Bunch will fill more than a few pages.

 

  

Baseball and Softball are similar in a number of ways but worlds apart in others. Baseball is quite possibly still America’s game, not by the wide margin that it once was but still atop the food  chain. Softball has made tremendous strides as of late but it remains a blip on the radar for most folks. Knowing this, makes it so easy to want to promote the sport in every way possible.

  Baseball is played in the same manner at every level and in five decades of being around the sport, I’ve never seen anyone hit the ground running like Burcham did in his first year. While the season ended one game short of the State Tournament, that shouldn’t take anything away from the rocket like start.

Greg Maddux and Tim Tebow, two people that I admire greatly both wore the uniform and I was blessed enough to join them in various Stadiums during their careers.

Will something happen today in the Border town of El Paso that will warrant being part of the story ? Maybe, Maybe not but but that’s the beauty of the game of baseball – anything can happen on any given day…

My back to back Seattle Mariners No Hitters are prove of that. Separated by a few years, Randy Johnson and Chris Bosio tossed No-No’s with both games taking place in the old Kingdome. The crowd both nights 🌙 was under 20,000 and the gems 💎 were the first two in team history.

 

The answer is Yes, El Paso presented something new to me ! Your food is served to you in an actual Dog 🐕 Bowl!!