Westman trio win college softball title

Ky Solomon is retiring from softball a winner.

The 18-year-old infielder from Shoal Lake spent last season at North Dakota State College of Science (NDSCS) in Wahpeton, N.D., where the team won the National Junior College Athletic Association’s Division 3 national championship on May 25 in Syracuse, N.Y.

To make it even better, she did it with her friends Kendall Charles of Virden and Naomi McKay of Waywayseecappo.

But she’s decided to step away from her playing career to get on with her life.

“I’ve decided not to go back and to get a head start on life now,” Solomon said. “I had a great experience and a great year but I realized the demands of practising and all that just weren’t for me. My courses don’t necessarily transfer to what I want to be in the future so I’m exploring my options in health care right now.”

“A lot of people I talk to are definitely surprised. Mom and dad are super supportive. They’re a little sad that this era is my life is over and I am too.”

She feels relieved that she’s going to start working on the next thing now, but adds she’s not done with softball yet and hopes to give back by coaching.

Championships have become familiar to the Westman trio. Solomon and McKay earned five provincial titles with the Westman Magic and Charles won four.

The three Westman women attended the Canada Summer Games with Team Manitoba in the week before they headed down to NDSCS, so the three athletes had certainly played a high level of ball before.

Solomon said there was a mix of very talented teams and some less successful clubs, and by the end of the season when the top teams were still around, the level of play was consistently very high.

“It’s pretty comparable to the level Team Toba was at,” Solomon said. “Definitely where I was at a junior college, everyone is 18 to 20 — we had a girl who was 21 but that was a rare thing — so we were all around the same age and all around the same skill level as players from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario.”

Team Toba actually played some college teams at a tournament last summer and went 4-0.

“The level of softball wasn’t as big a shock going from AAA to Team Manitoba then to college,” Charles said. “I feel like if I had gone straight from AAA to college it would have been a little different. I didn’t think it was that a big jump, especially because I’m at a two-year (school), so when you’re playing juco (junior college) the girls aren’t four years older than me.”

She did notice a difference in the fall when they played North Dakota, which is a four-year school.

Overall, Charles said college pitching is a lot better than AAA, in part because American pitchers throw a lot more spins.

“You’re seeing a lot more different pitches than you would in Manitoba,” said Charles, who played left field. College players also hit harder, which means the defence has to be better too.

Solomon appeared in 46 games, hitting .375 with 10 RBI, 38 runs scored and 22 stolen bases. The longtime shortstop moved over to second base, where she had a .942 fielding percentage.

“Going in as a freshman, we had a pretty strong group of sophomores, so I didn’t necessarily play as much as I have in the past but I think every time I went in, I proved to myself and my team that I was capable of playing,” Solomon said. “I would go in and pinch run, pinch hit and every time I went in I was happy with how I played.”

While the average Magic roster was 12 or 13 players, NDSCS carried 24 players. That ratcheted up the pressure to perform, because there was always someone on the bench hungry for a fresh opportunity.

“You can’t really think about it,” Solomon said. “You just have to go in there confident and do what you do. In the back of your head you’re probably thinking that, but I’ve been playing for so long that I’m confident in how I play. I know I can go in there and make an impact. You have to think positive and not think of the negative.”

The 19-year-old Charles played in 29 games, hitting .175 with seven RBI with an .833 fielding percentage. That meant she was watching a lot as the team posted an overall record of 55-8 and a 17-3 mark in the Mon-Dak Conference.

“It was difficult and hard to get to used to,” Charles said. “With the Magic, I definitely played a lot, almost 90 per cent of our games. It’s not super hard not playing all the time when there is big roster because there are more people who are in the same boat as you. One thing our team really thrived on was having a really loud bench and a really supportive bench because there were so many people on it all the time.

“Getting used to having my support my teammates was challenging but I got used to it as the year went on.”

McKay, who couldn’t be reached for comment, pitched in 32 games, starting 21 and posting a 13-5 record with a 3.29 earned run average and 92 strikeouts. She had plate appearances in 42 games, hitting .455 with three homers, 16 RBI and a .750 slugging percentage.

She was also named to the all-conference team as a pitcher and DP.

OFF THE FIELD

Solomon said the transition to the school, which is seven hours from home and 75 kilometres straight south of Fargo, actually went a lot smoother than she expected.

She said the biggest change with living in residence was the food because they ate in a cafeteria, which wasn’t her favourite thing.

Academically, things were fine.

“When we went on trips, it was easy to prioritize homework over hanging out,” Solomon said. “We had to do two hours of study tables every week so we had to go to study hall and clock in and be there. If you didn’t have homework, you could study. If you didn’t get your two hours in, the whole team would get punished.”

They only had one slip-up all season, which meant their hours got bumped up to four the next week.

The routine apparently suited her. She had a 3.9 grade-point average in her first semester and a perfect 4.0 in the second semester.

A big part of that was simple time management. After classes, she headed to practice from 3:45 to 6:30, and race over to the cafeteria to eat before it closed at 7 p.m.

“After that, you really don’t want to do homework but you force yourself,” Solomon said. She said she had a good sense of her routine by the end of September.

Charles didn’t struggle with the academic side of the equation either, in part because her Grade 12 teachers in Virden did a good job of preparing her. She also has two sisters who went to post-secondary, so she knew what to expect.

“I didn’t think it was very difficult,” Charles said. Charles admitted it was hard to be away from home at the start, but said it got easier in part because the team spent so much time together.

She also lived in residence with Jordan Winkelman of Oconomowoc, Wis.

“We got to know each other pretty quick, and I had a roommate the whole year who played on the softball team so I was pretty connected with people,” Charles said. She visited the small campus a couple of times before she went down, so she knew how to navigate her way around immediately.

“Every day was relatively the same when we were outside,” Charles said. “You didn’t have to worry about the time like indoor sports. My routine from school to practice to supper and lunch was the same for the first three months. After a couple of weeks I had the hang of it.”

WORLD SERIES

At the national event, NDSCS beat Erie Community College 11-4, blanked Corning 11-0 and then squeezed by Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute 3-1 to finish first overall in the round-robin.

Caldwell finished second, but had to beat NDSCS twice to win the title. In the first game, the school from East Syracuse, N.Y., did just that, spanking NDSCS 17-6 to set up a winner-takes-all final.

McKay drove in a run with a single for her team in cold and wet conditions.

“Every single person on our team was just like ‘Let’s go get this next one,’” Solomon said. “We were not losing. Every past championship NDSCS has won, they never had that insurance game, they were always do or die and the team that had to win twice. The first game, we needed to lose that to appreciate how impressive it actually is to win nationals. We went through the round-robin pretty easily.”

Charles noted head coach Mike Oehlke did a terrific job of refocusing the team after they dropped their first game at the event.

“Right after the loss we were definitely down, and we all got into the dugout and coach Mike gave us a little pep talk that we can’t be down on ourselves right now because we need to be at the highest that we can to come back and win that second game,” said Charles, who is returning to the school next season.

The clinching game was entirely different, with NDSCS racing out to an early lead and winning 15-3 in six innings for the school’s third title in four years. They had 13 hits, drew 10 walks and put across at least one run every inning, leading 7-3 after three innings.

Solomon was the only member of the Westman trio to play when she appeared as a pinch runner.

When the final out was made, the team celebrated its third Division III World Series victory in four years.

“I’ve never really experienced something like that,” Charles said. “We won multiple provincial championships with Magic but winning a World Series feels a lot different. There is a lot more excitement that comes with it.”

Solomon agreed.

“It was great,” Solomon said. “It was definitely cold though. Once the adrenalin wore off, we were just ready to get on the bus and go.”

» pbergson@brandonsun.com