Woodland Blows Out Sacred Heart In Class M Softball Title Game

STORRS, CT — A dream season for one high school girls softball squad ended with a nightmarish Saturday for another, as heavily-favored Woodland soundly defeated Sacred Heart Academy to win the CIAC Class M state softball championship.

The final score was 16-0, with the top-seeded Woodland Regional High School Hawks (Beacon Falls and Prospect) quickly squelching any "David versus Goliath" notions from the 18th-seed Sacred Heart Academy Sharks out of Hamden.

In winning the title for the second year in a row, Woodland and softball coach Loren Luddy ended the season undefeated, going a combined 24-0 taking into account regular season and tournament play.

A string of crooked numbers at Burrill Family Field on the University of Connectiut campus in Storrs made it clear who the top team was.

Not helping Sacred Heart's cause were four errors, several wild pitches and Woodland's heavy-hitting bats.

When it was over, Woodland pounded out 15 hits to accompany the 16 runs, many of them for extra bases.

The massive scoring outburst took a lot of pressure off Woodland starting pitcher Samantha Sosnovich, a right-handed senior whose high school career ended in a championship. She was the game's MVP.

With plenty of runs to work with, Sosnovich still beared down and limited the Sharks to three hits and no runs over the seven innings.

Going in, Woodland was 20-0 in the regular season, while Sacred Heart was 13-7.

Still, in a one-game, winner-take-all championship contest, anything can happen.

For Woodland, seemingly, everything good happened Saturday afternoon.

For Sacred Heart, it may have seemed that nothing good happened Saturday, but the spring's magical, improbable run to the title game should not go without a measure of credit.

Which explains why the Sharks still sported dignified smiles after the game while accepting their second-place medals.

For Woodland, the smiles started early.

Woodland's scoring began in the bottom of the second with a two-out RBI double to the right-center field gap by junior Lucia Rubano.

Both runners who scored had walked prior and Rubano's hit gave Woodland a 2-0 lead.

The next next inning, Woodland exploded for five more runs, padding the lead to 7-0.

Two Sacred Heart errors didn't help, but several hard hit balls by Woodland hitters also contributed to the dominant effort.

Extra-base RBI hits by sophomore Ella Van Alsteyne (double) and senior Peyton Fillipone (triple) highlighted a big inning that proved disastrous for Sacred Heart.

The Hawks tacked on three more runs in the fourth inning, aided by another error and some wild pitches to put the game away, 10-0.

With no mercy rule for CIAC championship games, Sacred Heart soldiered on as Woodland continued to tack on runs for the rest of the game, ballooning to 16-0 after five innings.