Fireside Shocks My Place To Win Women’s Slo-Pitch Title

By Andy Hutchison

Seeded fifth among six teams entering the Newtown Women’s Slo-Pitch Softball Tournament, Fireside was by no means a favorite, but caught fire at the right time and won three straight games en route to the summer championship this past week.

Fireside erupted for seven runs in the third inning and coasted to a 10-3 win over top-seeded My Place in the championship game at Treadwell Park on August 13.

Jodi Morris and Stacey Gordon both had run-scoring hits in the first inning, and Fireside blew open its 2-0 lead with a hit parade that just kept on going in the third. Ali Cordova smacked a two-run triple for a 4-0 lead. Gordon added a run-producing single and came all the way around to score on a pair of throwing errors to make it 6-0. Melissa Ansman added an RBI hit, and Kari Rustici capped off the scoring with a two-RBI hit for a 9-0 cushion.

Cordova, Gordon, and Anne Doersch all had three hits in the win. Kristen Grimaldi, Sandy Doski, and Kelly Tenney each had two hits for My Place.

Both teams made sharp plays in the field. Fireside escaped a fourth-inning bases-loaded jam and kept My Place off the scoreboard through the first six innings thanks, in part, to an out on a bang-bang play at home plate. Shortstop Nina Ricciardi made a throw to catcher Morris to nab My Place’s Grimaldi just before she slid across the plate.

My Place, down 10-0 and down to its final three outs, did not go down quietly. Stacy O’Donnell and Tenney both knocked in runs, and Doski and Grimaldi had hits in a three-run seventh.

Sure, winning is only a part of the enjoyment for summer league adults who have fun just hanging out with friends and competing, but it’s always a little sweeter to come out on top.

“Winning is just so much more fun — it really is,” Ricciardi, one of Fireside’s captains, said after the game.

And — win or lose — what would sports be without rivalries? The championship game pitted a pair of coworkers from Newtown Youth Academy: Gordon and O’Donnell enjoyed a few days of light-hearted trash-talking leading up to the pinnacle game.

“It’s been a lot of fun. She’s very competitive and so am I,” said O’Donnell, NYA’s marketing director.

The players joked with each other at work that they couldn’t talk until after the game and tried to convince their coworkers to support one and root against the other. Of course, with the players sharing the same first name, albeit with different spellings, it made it easy for their office peers to cover themselves and just say they were rooting for Stacy (or Stacey).

“It’s been a lot of fun. Everybody’s been getting into it,” added Gordon, who does sports information for NYA.