Amy McCaffrey couldn’t have written a better script.
The recent Upper Dublin graduate is the lone member of the Blue Thunder 18U Black softball team who will be heading off to college this fall, and if she was looking for the perfect sendoff, McCaffrey got one when she and her teammates walked away with the title at the prestigious ASA 18U Eastern National Tournament in Sterling, Va., last week.
“The whole thing was pretty surreal,” McCaffrey said. “It just seemed like a regular tournament, but once we got further into the tournament, it started to hit me that we were doing so well.
“This meant a lot. I’ll be going to college this fall, and I spend all of my summers playing softball. I went out with a bang. I won’t forget it.”
The Blue Thunder 18U Black– with eight SOL members on its roster – won six straight games en route to the tournament title. McCaffrey was joined on the title run by Central Bucks South’s Morgan Decker, Jae Epstein, Dani London and Kelly Culp as well as William Tennent’s Ashley Alden and Danyelle Meleta and Hatboro-Horsham’s Maggie Shaffer.
“It was really exciting,” Alden said. “I love playing school ball, but it feels really good to win.”
Rounding out the team were Perkiomen Valley’s Tori Marcavage and Archbishop Wood’s Sarah Yoos and Becky Notti.
“All of us have been playing for so long, and we have gotten so close so many times, so it was a big deal when we won,” said Decker.
It was Decker who drove in the game winner in the bottom of the seventh inning of the title game when she roped a one-out double to left field, plating Shaffer - who had singled - and giving the Blue Thunder a 3-2 win over the Black Widows.
“It was really exciting for our whole team,” said Shaffer, who played second base when she wasn’t on the mound. “This whole year we came in second a lot, so it was nice to actually win one.”
The Blue Thunder finished second in the ASA State Tournament in late June. They were second in the Midsummer Showcase in Virginia Beach but in that tournament notched consecutive wins over teams boasting pitchers with full rides to Virginia Tech, Brigham Young and Louisville respectively.
The Blue Thunder saw their string of second place finishes end when they finished third in the Harleysville Thunderbirds Tournament but followed that with another second place finish in the Delaware Invitational.
Then – on the season’s biggest stage – the Blue Thunder 18U Black squad broke that string of second place finishes when they captured the 45-team ASA Eastern National Tournament.
“It really ends the season on such a high note,” Decker said. “I have been playing with at least half of our team since I was 10 years old.
“We have such a strong group of girls that know each other so well – we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and we can play off of each other. Even the newer girls have really blended together so well with our team. We’ve gotten to know them so well that it’s almost like we’ve known them since they were 10.”
Shaffer – in just her second year with the Blue Thunder Black after playing with the Banshees – is one of the ‘newer’ players on the squad.
“At first it was kind of weird because I always played against the Blue Thunder,” she said. “But I got used to it. It was fun. I liked it.”
On opening day of Eastern Nationals, the Blue Thunder notched a convincing 10-2 win over the Ohio Bandits and the next day earned wins over the South Jersey Devils (4-1), Cincy Storm (8-0) and Ohio Pride (5-1). That’s when the players started to realize they might be onto something special.
“We beat a couple of really good teams in the middle of the tournament, and we started looking at it like, ‘Wow, we can really do this,’” Decker said. “These teams were beating up on everyone else, and we were beating up on them.”
“We kept winning and winning and winning,” McCaffrey added. “We didn’t really have close games. We were pretty strong through every game, and everyone was doing really well.”
The Blue Thunder followed those wins with an 11-1 rout of the Black Widows only to see the Black Widows battle their way back through the loser’s bracket to earn a rematch with the Blue Thunder in the title game of the double elimination tournament.
“We had 10-runned them, and we were kind of going into it like, ‘This shouldn’t be hard,’ but it ended up being a 2-2 game in the seventh inning,” McCaffrey said.
Actually, the Blue Thunder twice rallied from one-run deficits to knot the score before winning it in the seventh. Underscoring just how well the team played was the fact that the Blue Thunder did not commit an error in the entire tournament.
“Our team came together,” Decker said. “We all hit as a team, we all fielded as a team. It’s one thing to have individual players being awesome with the bat or awesome in the field, but when your whole team can come together and do that – that’s the difference.”
“We all knew it was a bigger tournament, and we had to work harder,” Shaffer added. “Going into the tournament, we were just trying to do our best and hopefully not get in the loser’s bracket.
“Our whole team really enjoyed it. We just like playing, and it was even better to win.”
This group of players has grown accustomed to winning. Many of them were part of the team that finished third in Pony Nationals when they were 13 and was the national runner-up a year later. They also took fifth in Pony Nationals, but this was their first trip to an ASA National Tournament, and they made it a memorable one.
“It was really exciting,” said Alden, who recently made a verbal commitment to accept a softball scholarship to Rutgers University. “I think we realized we had a really good shot to win it. We came in second so many times, and we were just sick of it, so we decided we were going to win it.
“We’re all friends, and it’s good to end on such a good note.”
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