Rockets Celebrate Successful Softball Season
Community members came out to congratulate the EBF softball team on their successful season.
Eddyville, Iowa – The Eddyville Rockets took part in one of, if not the most, epic games ever played at the state softball tournament.
The game which last three hours and twenty-four minutes, going 16 innings, is something the school district, players, family, and friends will never forget.
But even though the team came up short, the community wanted to celebrate the success they had enjoyed, but that celebration had to be put on hold, while some of the team members took a church trip to Colorado.
Rockets Head Coach Tony Fenton spoke about that game, “I mean it was intense the whole game. Each team was making plays defensively and keeping the other ones from scoring. Then we got the three runs in the top of the sixteenth there, and everybody is on a high, and then they turn around and got the four in the bottom half and win the game. But it was one of those well-played games when you go back and look at the game and see all the defensive plays that both teams had to make to get the game to go that far. Both pitchers I thought pitched outstanding games. We have one that’s a strikeout pitcher and the other one that’s more of a finesse pitcher. Randy did a heck of a job on the mound, and it was just a great game.”
Being placed in the history books for that game, “I don’t know, it’s still kind of unbelievable. What did they say? Three hours and 24 minutes long, and we had a chance to go one more inning there at the end too. We lead them back into the game, and if we had got that last out, it goes to seventeen innings. It’s hard to explain, you know you live through it, and I’ll probably never see another game like that,” said Fenton.
Making it back to the state tournament was something the freshman girls set as a goal back in 2014 to do before they graduated. “All year long that was their goal, and they worked hard in the off season, and we played really well at the beginning of the season. And then in the middle of the season, we played some great teams and had some losses. They had to fight back through some adversity there, and they did, and we were able to do what we needed to do. We thought that we and Pella Christian might have been a championship game, but it turned out that Regina was more of a challenge than Pella Christian,” explained Fenton.
During the season, and especially as the postseason began, the kinship between the Oskaloosa softball squad and the EBF squad grew. “Our kids and their kids, they know each other. They play a lot of ball together, and we root for each other. You have Oskaloosa and Eddyville, and fifteen miles the other way, we have Albia. That’s pretty good softball in this area. We had three teams that were vying there on Thursday to get into the championship games. You know it’s just great, I’m good friends with Jay, and it’s just great to see the success,” said Fenton.
