By BAKER ELLIS / Sports Editor

PELHAM – On March 19, the Pelham softball Lady Panthers were falling apart. Playing in a tournament at Hoover High School, Pelham lost a 7-1 contest to cross-town rival Helena in a game where a seasons’ worth of pent-up frustration had boiled over onto the field. The loss moved the Lady Panthers to 4-14-2, and Pelham head coach Sabrina Tutchtone wasn’t sure the season was salvageable at that moment.

“During that Hoover tournament in March, I really thought, ‘What am I doing?’” Tutchtone said on May 25. “No one wanted to be there, there were chemistry issues, no one trusted each other. Against Helena, that took us to the depths. We invented errors in that game.”

This was Tutchtone’s second year as the head coach of the Pelham program, after spending the previous two years as an assistant and the 17 years before that at Prattville High School. In all of her time coaching softball, she had never had a losing season before this year. While she knew this team might suffer some losses in the early going, there was a chemistry issue with this Lady Panthers team in the middle of the season that had to be fixed.

“There wasn’t a lot of enjoyment in March,” Tuchtone said. “After that tournament at Hoover, we went on spring break and we didn’t even see each other the whole break, which we all needed. We came back with all new attitudes and went to work. Little by little you could see it coming together.”

After spring break, the young Pelham squad began to finally put the pieces together. A seven-game win-streak from April 13-23 went a long way to helping the team rebuild, and moving into the area tournament at Hueytown High School on April 29, the Lady Panthers had finally found their groove. After Pelham beat John Carroll Catholic 7-2 in the first round, Pelham moved on to face Hueytown, a team Pelham had lost to twice in the regular season.

In the first game between the two in the double-elimination format, Tuchtone knew her team had officially turned the corner when Kacie Mayer hit her first career home run to left field with two strikes against her in the top of the fourth inning, and flashed a huge smile rounding third base.

“The smile she had on her face, that was the smile I needed,” Tuchtone said. “When she lit up like that, and the whole team saw that, I knew it had come to fruition. That smile showed where we’d been and what we had come through.”

Pelham went on to beat Hueytown twice in a row to claim the area title, and pulled its record all the way back to .500 at 19-19-3. The Panthers ended the season 19-21-3 after falling in the regional tournament, but the area tournament championship proved how resilient this team turned out to be.

“It was worth it,” Tuchtone said. “In the middle of the year, I thought I should retire, I thought they needed some young guns to take over. But the way this team came together and finished, it makes me look forward to next year.”

Pelham softball will fall victim to an incredibly tough area next year, as the AHSAA classification realignment is putting the Lady Panthers in the same area as the 6A state champion Chelsea Lady Hornets as well as Helena, which placed second in the 5A state tournament this year as well. However, the Lady Panthers are only graduating one player in Alexis Eisenberg and will return a core group including Mayer, Dalton Merrill, Sawyer Martin, Carly Edinger as well as youngsters Yoly Paredes and Cadence Crocker.