Making Noise

The softball team takes its first-ever national championship!

by Mike Warwick

Four times before in her career Deb Pallozzi had taken her Ithaca College softball team to the NCAA Division III championship finals (an eight-team double-elimination tournament that crowns the sport’s national champion). Each time the Bombers were eliminated after losing their first two games.

This year’s trip was different --- and not only because of the lightning that struck the team’s plane during the flight to Wisconsin. The Bombers picked up their first win in NCAA championship competition, held in Eau Claire --- and then they kept on winning . . . until they’d taken the softball program’s first national title.

Photo by Andi Stempniak

Ithaca went 4-1 at the tournament (winning 1-0 against Bethany, 5-3 against Salisbury, and 1-0 over Emory). A third 1-0 win came in the tournament’s final game, when the Bombers edged Lake Forest (to whom they’d lost 4-2 in the first game), setting off an Ithaca celebration.

"I paced, the entire game," explained Pallozzi, who found herself more nervous than usual as the seventh inning unfolded. "There were two outs, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, we might do this.’ "

The Bombers scored the game’s only run in the second inning, when senior outfielder Mairin Dudek singled, sending home junior outfielder Kim Stephens; stellar pitching and smart defense made the run stand up. Junior Abby Hanrahan earned the win (her 8th of the postseason and 22nd overall) by throwing 5.1 innings of three-hit shutout ball. Freshman Abbey Pelot was brought in to pitch with one out in the sixth and the tying run on second. She retired the final five batters for her first career save; Lake Forest put a runner on base with two outs in the seventh, but the Foresters were unable to score, and the Bombers landed the College’s 13th national team championship.

The win was Ithaca’s 37th of the season (a school record) and a perfect finish to the careers of Ithaca’s three seniors. "To end my career with a win is really something special," said outfielder Kim Sebastiao. "You strive to be the best for four years, you work hard and believe in a dream, and you hope that it comes true. To have my dream become a reality in what will probably end up being my last competitive game ever --- that’s a feeling I don’t think I could put into words."

Another Bomber senior, catcher Kristin Furdon, earned first-team all-American honors for the second time in her career and scored the only runs in Ithaca’s first two 1-0 wins. After three previous trips to the championship round of the NCAA playoffs, she contributed to the huge advantage of experience that Ithaca enjoyed. In fact, no other team at the finals had even participated in last year’s championship round. Furdon thinks that fact was an important component of Ithaca’s self-confidence. "The upperclassmen had been here so many times, and knowing that none of the other teams had been here last year helped a lot," she says. "Before, we’d come in wide-eyed and not sure that we could actually win. This year we didn’t know we could win, but we knew we could do well."

Entering as fifth seed, Ithaca played in the second game of the tournament. Watching the result of the first game --- in which unbeaten Pacific Lutheran, the top seed, lost to eighth-seeded Salisbury --- was another boost to Ithaca’s confidence. "We’d always come in as [a lower] seed, and we’d always played the two seed," Furdon explains. "This year being the five seed gave us the boost we needed to come in confident, knowing we could win."

Pallozzi agrees. Seeing the tournament’s top two seeds (Pacific Lutheran and St. Thomas) lose opening-round games and meet in an elimination game, she says, reinforced the fact that any of the eight participating teams could bring home the trophy.

Sebastiao puts it this way: "After going to the World Series three years in a row and losing in two straight games every time, I think we were ready to make some noise this time. We knew that this year could be different, as long as we played the kind of softball we knew we were capable of playing."