Normal West softball are dealing with a bit of a rough start while navigating a lot of change and ne faces.
“I feel like we’re building a new team and we’re all learning how to play with the new group of girls,” Junior captain McKinley Pate stated.
There is more of a learning curve this season with a new head coach and players adjusting to new positions and people around them.
“We’re still trying to figure out our new players, also moving around to different positions. So we’re trying to figure out who we’re next to on the field,” Senior Erika Durham added.
With all of the change, the main goal for this year’s team is to close the communication gap.
“When we get on the field, something flips a switch, and we don’t talk to each other as much,” Durham admitted.
While the team’s relationship is very close-knit, this communication does not translate to the field.
“We have silly errors due to a lack of communication, which leads to runners on the opposite team to advance and score,” Pate stated.
Even if the communication on the field isn’t up to their standard, the girls continue to work on their relationships off of the field in hopes of ‘spill-over.’
“Having a good group of girls who are all super close and everybody’s friends with each other makes it easy to play and compete with,” Pate explained.
The relationships extend to the coaching staff, as well.
“We have a really good coaching staff,” Durham said.
With the evident goal to “win…conference and make it somewhat far in postseason,” as Pate states, Durham looks at the process goal to get to that outcome: “I say, keep improving and playing consistently as a team.”
No matter what the answer is to their success, the team knows that it all starts with practice.
“I would say we’re working hard in practice every day. We’re focusing on warm-ups, so we’re not just going through the motions and finding ways to be better in every situation, and if something is going wrong, we’ll talk through it to see what happened,” Pate stated.
The team uses one specific phrase to hold the program to a standard, that is, “O.N.E. or Only Need Everyone.”
“The phrase ‘O.N.E.’ means only need everyone, which as a team means to us you have to play the game with everyone. It’s not a single person game; you build off of each other to become one team,” Pate stated.
The girls are 3-9 overall, but 1-0 in conference play.
They will travel to Danville on Thursday, April 16.
Important dates on the schedule include a matchup with rival team, Normal Community, on May 5.
