SPRING HILL – For most of Springstead’s softball team, Wednesday night’s game against Citra-North Marion was the first foray into regional play. But for pitcher Kama Woodall, these high-leverage postseason contests are old hat.
The junior tossed a 1-hitter in the Class 6A, Region II quarterfinal, striking out 12 as the host Lady Eagles cruised to a 6-0 victory.
“We feel great,” Woodall said. “Coming into the season we just wanted to win every game we could. Now that we’ve kind of meshed together this season and made it this far, it’s a pretty big deal for us.
“I was just able to mix up my pitches a lot. I had a tight defense behind me, so I knew that anything that got hit was going to get played well.”
This is Woodall’s first season at Springstead, after playing the past three at St. Petersburg-Canterbury. She pitched the Lady Crusaders to back-to-back 2A state titles in 2013-14, and to the Final Four last year.
Wednesday marked her 15th game in regionals or the FHSAA Finals, and she’s only lost one. So clearly she knows what it takes to win this time of year.
“It helps me understand that from this point forward we have to win every game. And it helps me understand how to pace myself but to also leave everything on the field,” Woodall said. “This team has everything that it takes to be a cohesive unit and make it to the Final Four. All it takes is the understanding that it’s do or die at this point.
“We don’t talk a lot about my past experience. The most that I say is that ‘I’ve been there before and I know how it is.’ So in practice we just work harder, we do better. We just adopt the attitude that we have to win every game now.”
At 26-1, the Lady Eagles have already won virtually every time out, with Woodall being a huge part of the equation. Before facing North Marion, she was 17-1 with a 0.80 earned run average, having struck out 143 batters in 123 innings.
The few times she hasn’t taken the mound Kayla Cruz has picked up the slack going 8-0 with a 0.81 ERA.
“We’ve got two of the best pitchers around. They’re going to keep us in games, even in games where we’re not on top of our game,” Springstead head coach Craig Swartout said. “She (Woodall) pitched well, she kept us in the game. Eventually in a game we’re going to start putting some hits together and we’ll score runs.”
Woodall was spotted an early lead against the Lady Colts (10-11) with a two-spot in the bottom of the first inning. Emily Kolwicz worked a leadoff walk, stole second and scored on Abby Oliver’s single. Oliver eventually came around on a sacrifice fly to left by Cruz.
Delaney Woodall singled and scored on a wild pitch in the second, and notched a run batted in on a double off the center fielder’s glove in the fifth. Earlier in the inning, Paige Pfent smacked a two-run home run over the fence in left-center.
Despite the relatively stress-free triumph, Swartout wasn’t entirely pleased with the performance.
“I think we pitched real well. We were just flat tonight,” Swartout said. “We didn’t have a whole lot of energy. It was an uninspired effort. I don’t know what it is, but we did enough to win. I’ve just got to do a better job of getting them mentally prepared to play, because tonight for whatever reason we just didn’t have the energy.
“In the playoffs you can’t come like that. You can’t come half-stepping. You have to be ready to go. I will do a better job of getting these girls ready. I didn’t do a very good job this week.”
Springstead advanced to next Tuesday’s regional semifinals, where it’ll host Crystal River. The Lady Eagles have already defeated the district-rival Lady Pirates three times this season, by a combined 23-6.
“We come back tomorrow and we hit, and we try to get ready for next week,” Swartout said. “We will get back to the grind and see how things work out, and be ready for Tuesday.”
Meanwhile for Kama Woodall, each postseason contest is an opportunity to prove herself all over again at a higher classification.
“I wasn’t thinking about it at the beginning of the season because I didn’t know what I was walking into really,” Woodall said. “But when I got here I didn’t realize what a strong unit we had as a team and how well put together it already was. Now that I know that we have the opportunity to do it, it makes me even hungrier for it.
“We had a fantastic team at Canterbury and we played a lot of upper-class teams but that didn’t get seen a lot. Now that I have the opportunity to play against upper-class teams and have it be seen, it’s a big deal, too.”
Follow Chris Bernhardt Jr. on Twitter @cpbernhardtjr.