“To be able to keep players after you have a bad season tells you that they still had a good experience and we finished and we learned and we got better,” said softball head coach Kristy Schroeder.

By that standard, Cosumnes River College’s sophomore players had good experiences, as nine out of the 10 players from last season returned to the team, and added to that is a mix of freshman.

However, the team missed out on achieving its goal of heading into the postseason by a few games. That’s not to say that this season was bad. In fact, Schroeder said that she thinks all of the current freshman will return to next year’s team.

Team captain and sophomore pitcher Allison Barsetti said that she watched the team come together throughout the season and saw her teammates improve, become stronger players and become better prepared for their games.

“It was a good season, I had a lot of fun with all the girls,” Barsetti said. “We were really close, [especially] all the sophomores.”

Schroeder said she thought that the team played well and showed improvement throughout the season.

“It was fun to see this team grow. I do think we have a lot of good kids on this team,” Schroeder said.

“There are definitely some kids that had their ups and downs, but I think at the end everybody left with a good taste in their mouth and felt like ‘hey we were really close to achieving our goal of making it to postseason.’”

Despite the positive outlook on the season, missing out on postseason play was still difficult.

“Ending the season was hard for me because we were so close to moving on to playoffs,” said sophomore shortstop Alissa Greenhaw in an email interview. “We had a really solid team coming into league and then unfortunately there were a few injuries and other mishaps. I think it’s safe to say that we had the talent to make it, but we gave up a few games that should have been definite wins for us which cost us in the long run.”

The team started the season with a few close losses, but began to win some of the close games towards the end of the season.

“We were in it to the end,” Schroeder said. “I thought that we definitely progressed throughout the season.”

Schroeder made sure to emphasize the ability of the team to get hits and runs. Even in the games where the Hawks would not score, she still said the team was able to hit the ball hard.

“I never felt like in any of the games we couldn’t score enough runs to win,” Schroeder said. “It was a matter of ‘can our pitchers eliminate the amount of walks’ and ‘can our defense make the plays when we need to make the plays.’”

And pitching is one of the things the coach is looking to work on for the next year. Barsetti did a majority of the pitching throughout the season, but freshman pitcher Jessica Venturelli did her fair share.

“I think Jessica started pitching better at the end of the year too, and we were able to get a little bit more from her,” Schroeder said. “If she can come back with a year under her belt and get a little bit more confidence, then I think that will help us.”

Barsetti is looking into four-year schools to transfer to, but she still had a message for next year’s team.

“[The future team members] need to have that aggressive attitude and want to win and keep on pushing themselves to that next level to constantly make themselves better,” Barsetti said. “And [they should] compete with other people on the team to constantly strive for more.”