Softball: Tough leader, young coaches get program back on track

“I wanted to go out on top,” senior pitcher Alex Peyton said of her final season with the softball team.

This weekend, Peyton did just that, displaying just how important she was to a team that made a major turnaround this season. She let up just two hits and one unearned run in a full seven innings on Saturday against Cornell. That would already make for a respectable weekend for most pitchers, but Peyton was the team’s workhorse, finishing the season with 13 complete games. She was also given the start the next day, the last day of her college career, and ended up pitching what amounted to more than two games — the Tigers (27-19 overall, 12-8 Ivy League) and the Big Red (20-26, 8-12) went to 15 innings, with Peyton not surrendering a run until the bottom of the 15th.

Though the game ended in defeat, Peyton’s achievement was remarkable — she pitched 21-and-a-third innings in two days, surrendering only two runs and stranding 21 Cornell runners, and was rewarded with an Ivy League Pitcher of the Week honor, the second of her season and third of her career. She also had two home runs on the weekend and said she did not think about how much she had pitched until it was over.

“It’s a lot of adrenaline in the moment — you’re kind of like, ‘Oh, it’s fine; it’s just another inning,’ ” she said. “But I was definitely really sore after.”

Sore arms are nothing new to Peyton, who pitched 28 innings when Cornell came to visit in 2012 and threw 120-and-two-thirds innings this season, more than a third of the team’s total. She also helped usher in a promising freshman class that included freshman pitcher Shanna Christian, who logged 79-and-a-third innings in her rookie year and finished with the best record on the team. Christian credits much of her success to the influence of Peyton, who played first and acted as a mentor when she was not pitching.

“She guides me when I’m pitching, and I have to have her at first base when I’m throwing — otherwise it’s just not going to be a good game,” Christian said. “She’s my on-the-field pitching coach.”

“I could talk about that kid for days,” head coach Lisa Sweeney said of Peyton. “She exudes confidence and focus and competitiveness, and it rubs off. I think the young players, Shanna in particular, really caught on to that.”

The combination of veterans like Peyton and a new coaching staff has effectively guided many of Princeton’s young players, and in turn it led the Tigers to their first winning Ivy season since 2008, when they beat Harvard in the Ivy League Championship series and advanced to NCAA regionals.

Under the direction of two newcomers, Sweeney — now the winningest first-year coach in program history — and assistant coach Jen Lapicki, the softball team experienced a major turnaround this year, going 27-19 overall and 12-8 in the Ivy League after going 8-12 in the league in 2012.

Last season, only one player, Kelsey VandeBergh ’12, boasted a batting average above .300, while opposing pitchers had a 2.12 ERA against the Tigers. Meanwhile, no Tiger pitcher, not even Peyton, had an ERA below 3.00.

This year, the team’s ERA dropped from 3.50 to 2.59, with Peyton, Christian and senior Liza Kuhn all finishing the season at or under 3.00. Offensively, Princeton’s batting average rose from .248 to .296, and the Tigers hit 20 more homers than they did in 2012.

Peyton, who hit 11 of those bombs, chalks up the turnaround to the new coaching staff.

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“I think a lot can be attributed to the coaches because they really had such great positivity, which we really needed, and they made us believe all season that we could win every single game,” Peyton said. “A lot of the girls needed that, needed someone to believe in them.”

Christian agreed that attitude was key, saying that the talent had been there all along.

“I remember during the fall season when I first got on the field with all the girls, I was really confused as to why we had had a couple losing seasons before — everybody was just so talented,” she said.

Christian said that Sweeney, who graduated from Lehigh, where she was Patriot League Pitcher of the Year four years in a row, and Lapicki, who played in four NCAA tournaments for both Tennessee and Florida State, connected with their student-athletes easily.

“They’re pretty fresh out of their game too because they’re really young, so it’s really nice to have their energy,” Christian said. “They can relate to us on that level.”

“I think it can be an asset if you choose to look at it that way,” Sweeney said. “A lot of people can say that inexperience can be detrimental, but I think, from our experience, we get it, we know what they're going through.”

The Tigers fell short of their ultimate goal this season but established themselves as contenders in the league.

“We were really happy with this season,” Christian said. “We achieved a good majority of our goals. The only thing we really fell short of was the Ivy Championship, and I think that is still in the cards for us in the next couple of seasons.”

Sweeney was certain that getting close this year will encourage the Tigers next season.

“I think we'll have a team that comes back really hungry for an Ivy League Championship,” she said.