Wesley Chapel High Softball Team Still Young, But Improved

Pitcher Ally Fraley

The Wesley Chapel High (WCH) softball team, under coach Steve Mumaw, is still going to be young but has enough veteran experience returning to create what should be a stable blend of talent. The team boasts five sophomore starters, all of whom started the 2016 season as freshmen.

“It’s basically our whole infield,” Mumaw said. “We have an exciting future ahead of us, some might end up going to the new school (Cypress Creek High, which opens next fall), but we’re going to coach them up the same.”

The Wildcats suffered through a feast-or-famine 7-17 season last year, scoring eight or more runs in five of their wins, but scoring two runs or less nine times during losses. During one stretch, they were blanked in four of six games, all but one against district opponents.

The Wildcats will have to find a way to string hits together. Leading hitter and sophomore third baseman Ashley Nickisher (32 hits, .421 avg.) returns to the fold. Nickisher tied for the team lead in RBI last season with fellow sophomore Neely Peterson, and led the team with four triples and added six doubles.

Senior Dana Mumaw, the coach’s daughter, hit .390 last season with a team-high nine doubles. The hope is that the potent duo in the middle of the lineup can get the offense going.

Incoming freshman pitchers Jordan Almasy and Ally Fraley, both right-handers, add some punch to the WCH bullpen.

INF Ashley Nickisher

“It’s an upgrade from what we had last year,” Mumaw said.

With a team ERA of 9.07 last season, the Wildcats are sure to improve in 2017, especially considering Almasy has already verbally committed to the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

One of the top travel league players in the area, Almasy boasts a fastball in the mid-60 mile-per-hour range, and she swings a solid bat as well.

Wesley Chapel will need to lean on a defense that needs to be improved, and with everyone returning it should be.

“Softball is a lot of small ball,” Mumaw said. “You have to make sure your first-base and third-base defenses are all correct.”

The Wildcats will need them to be, because they play in a district where offense is king.

Defending Class 6A, District 7 champ Land O’ Lakes can both hit and run, batting .326 with 68 stolen bases last year en route to a 27-3-1 record and appearance in the state semifinals.

Even the district runners-up, River Ridge, can hit and steal — the Royal Knights piled up 15 home runs and 61 stolen bases a year ago.

With expected improvement from Pasco High as well this season, the Wildcats still hope to improve on last year’s 3-7 district record.

Quartet Of Seniors To Lead Wiregrass Ranch High Softball

(L.-r.): Wiregrass Ranch High senior softball players Kameron Aitken, Alexis Ridolph, Sam Hiley & Jaime Valenta. All four have signed to play college softball next season (Photo by Andy Warrener).

Spring is in the air and so are the softballs at Wiregrass Ranch High (WRH).

The softball team embarks on the 2017 season with high hopes. After going 9-12 a year ago, the 2017 Bulls are preparing for a season with something they haven’t had, well, ever  — a quartet of seniors, all of whom have signed to play collegiate softball.

Veterans Jaime Valenta, Sam Hiley, Alexis Ridolph and Kameron Aitken will lead a Wiregrass squad with hopes of making a little bit of school history.

The Bulls have never won a district title and despite going 9-6 outside the league, were 0-6 last year in Class 8A, District 4, a division filled with some of the better Hillsborough County softball programs.

However, if there was ever a year to make some history, it could be this one. Hiley, Aitken and Valenta were WRH’s top three hitters from 2016, and along with Ridolph make up the top four batters in your typical Bulls lineup.

Valenta provides the speed, and has been the team’s lead-off hitter the last two seasons. The right-handed centerfielder has signed to play at the next level with St. John’s River State College.

As the leadoff hitter, Valenta’s job is to get on base and then steal some, and she did both well last season, batting .377, including .428 over the final eight games. She led the Bulls in triples with four, and stolen bases with 15 in 16 attempts.

Valenta has 32 steals for her career.

“I’m the table-setter,” she says. “I enjoy the leadoff position, I’m more of a contact hitter. My teammates hit me around.”

Aitken, the Bulls’ shortstop, signed her letter of intent in November to play at Florida International University. Aitken brings a .973 fielding percentage over from last season, with just two errors in 21 games at arguably the game’s toughest position.

She hit .422, second on the team, and led the Bulls with four homers and 30 RBI.

Hiley, who is signed to play collegiate ball at Edward-Waters College in Jacksonville, can also play catcher, but is more of a utility player, able to fill in at third base, left field or wherever she is needed.

“I’m like the Band-Aid,” she says.

Hiley’s bat, though, can sometimes leave the opposing pitcher’s arm needing a Band-Aid. Last year, she led the Bulls with 30 hits in 65 official at bats, for a team-best .462 average. She was second on the team in runs scored (19), RBI (21), doubles (5) and homers (2). She carries over a six-game hitting streak from last season into this one, which officially opens Saturday, February 11, at Dunnellon. The Bulls home opener is tonight, February 15, 7:30 p.m., against the Land O’Lakes High Gators.

Hiley’s versatility is shared by Ridolph, who has shifted between second and shortstop in her tenure at Wiregrass and batted .317 last year. A Hillsborough Community College (HCC) signee, she’ll join her older sister Kaitlyn there, for a year.

“It feels unreal, being a senior,” Ridolph said. “I saw my sister and my friends graduate and I still can’t believe it’s actually my senior year now.”

WRH head coach Yamani Vazquez is delighted to have such a talented and experienced senior core, which will be backed up by some impressive younger players like junior Kacie Lemanski (.382) and sophomore Miranda Perez (.379), plus a sophomore-laden pitching staff.

“It’s exciting, it’s a great motivation for the younger players that the seniors are college recruits,” Vazquez says.

It wasn’t too long ago they were just starry-eyed freshmen themselves, fighting older players for playing time.

“I don’t think people consider just how fast the years go by,” Hiley said. “I remember when I was a freshman, Jordan Pierceall (a WRH senior at the time) told us that the years go by faster than you think, and I was looking at her and laughing. Now, I’ve blinked and it’s my senior year.”

Senior night will be held on April 13, against district rival Freedom High.

“I remember decorating for past Senior Nights,” Valenta said. “Now, it’s going to be decorated for us. I probably won’t cry but I don’t know.”

Freedom’s Megan Clark Determined To Be The Best

Freedom senior Megan Clark scores two of her game-high 26 in the Patriots’ 78-0 win over Leto.

Basketball is always on the mind of Freedom High guard Megan Clark. It occupies her thoughts, her dreams, virtually every hour of her life, awake or asleep. She’s just as intense in a hard-fought, cross-town rivalry game against Wharton as she is in a 78-0 blowout of Leto (see story, next page).

“She never takes a play off, she will not take a play off,” Patriots head coach Laurie Pacholke says. “She goes 32 minutes, all out. It doesn’t matter who we’re playing. She’s put herself in shape to go all out for 32 minutes.”

The level of dedication Clark exhibits is uncommon.

“People don’t realize that those are the little things that will help you be successful at the next level,” Pacholke says.

Clark’s level of dedication can be chalked up as obsession.

She wakes up before dawn, most days of the week, to hit the New Tampa YMCA for a 5 a.m. shoot around and practice session. She is almost always the first player to arrive at team practice, and the last to leave.

“She bought the WNBA TV package with her own money, if that doesn’t tell you something,” Pacholke says. “She just has a love for the game. I’ve seen that growth in her (more than in any other player) over the years.”

It wasn’t always that way for Clark.

In sixth grade, while at Liberty Middle School, she decided to try out for every sport she could, just to get an idea of what she liked. She played youth soccer but stepped up to track, volleyball, soccer and basketball that year. “I was bad, awful at basketball in middle school,” Clark said. “I just really liked playing it and thought I’d get better at it.”

And yes, she did.

Clark made the Freedom varsity team her freshman year, a significant feat considering the Patriots the year before made the State semifinals.

Pacholke remembers Clark coming to a game with her father and the post-game discussion revolved around how Clark might see the floor by her junior year.

Clark sped up her coach’s timetable. If she wasn’t at the YMCA in the morning, she was draining buckets at the local outdoor court in Tampa Palms’ Compton Park neighborhood.

When she stayed until the lights went out, she’d come home and shoot at the hoop in her driveway. She not only made the varsity team her freshman year, she scored 18 points in the third game that season.

“She’s a student of the game,” Pacholke says. “She has passion, athletic ability and that really sets her up. I knew then (after the 18-point game) that in her four years at Freedom, her growth was going to be even greater.”

Clark went from averaging 7.3 points per game as a freshman, to 9.7 as a sophomore, 14.7 as a junior and as of the Leto game, she’s averaging 23.6 points per game, third-best in Class 8A, this season.

“I’d say that in a span of four years, Megan has probably improved more than any other kid I’ve coached,” Pacholke says.

Playing At The Next Level

The hard work and dedication have paid off. Clark went to a summer camp at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville. There, she said that she had one of the best camps of her life and that she loved the facility, the players and the coaches.

She came away from that 2016 camp with her heart set on where she wanted to continue her career. The call came a week later. Clarke was taking a walk in her neighborhood when the phone rang. She recognized the number — because she had saved it in her cell phone— it was Tennessee Tech head coach Kim Rosamond.

“I knew it was Coach Rosamond,” Clark says. “She told me pretty quickly in the conversation that they wanted to offer me a scholarship and I (verbally) committed right there.”

Clark signed her letter of intent this past November and entered into a final phase of her prep career, one that few high school athletes get to enjoy.

“Those few months after a player has signed are really the first time in their lives they are playing for fun,” Pacholke says. “When you find the right place (to go to college), you’re going to know, and I don’t think Megan could have found a better fit than Tennessee Tech.”

Rosamond and Clark should develop nicely together. The current season is Rosamond’s first as head coach of the Division I program, which competes in the Ohio Valley Conference and is 6-12 overall. Clark is Rosamond’s first recruit.

With Clark’s team-first mentality and dogged determination, the future is bright for both athlete and program.

“If she (Clark) improved that much over the four years here at Freedom, I can only imagine how much she’ll improve over four years with a collegiate program,” Pacholke says.

78-0? Really?

Pacholke found herself in an unusual position during a game on Jan. 17 against Leto.

She was rooting for the Falcons to score a basket. Any basket.

Alas, it did not happen.

Final score: Freedom 78, Leto 0.

That is not a typo.

“I felt bad,’’ said Pacholke, who has coached in her fair share of routs in her eight years at Freedom, but last week’s shutout was a first.

“We were saying ‘Please shot go in, please shot go in, please shot go in’ in the fourth quarter,’’ Pacholke said. “We wanted them to get on the board. We definitely weren’t playing for a shutout.”

Pacholke said she was able, however, to use the game as a teaching moment for her players, who she felt had given up late in their previous game, a loss to Plant.

Leto may not have scored, but they kept coming.

“They had fight in them,’’ Pacholke said. “I think a lot of times that gets lost, but those kids, they never gave up.”

Leto has had a rough time of it against New Tampa teams. The Falcons previous worst loss was a 50-1 defeat against Wharton on Jan. 4.

“It’s such a tough situation,’’ Pacholke said. “Do you just stop playing? Do you not play? I look at it from my perspective, and I’m a very competitive person, so if I’m in that kind of situation, I’d be insulted if the other team just stopped playing.”

In retrospect, Pacholke says she wishes she had called up some junior varsity players for the game, but didn’t think of it.

But, she says she played her starters as little as she could with her small roster, and the team did not press or run the ball up the floor on every possession.

And, while it was the first time one of  her teams ever shut out an opponent, she says she hopes it is the last.

WCH Soccer Girls’ Ferocious Forwards Also Are Pernicous Passers

After fighting through injuries her first season, Victoria Mitchell has emerged as one of Pasco County’s top strikers, leading Wesley Chapel with 32 goals heading into the District 3A-7 playoffs. (Photo courtesy of TheCSSN.com)

As the sun sets on the 2016-17 winter girls soccer regular season, the Wesley Chapel High (WCH) Wildcats are looking like a team poised to make a deep playoff run and possibly take home the first girls soccer district title in school history.

It’s thanks in large part to the team’s two high-scoring forwards, senior Bailey Hern and junior Tori Mitchell.

“It’s great to watch,” WCH head coach Michelle Clark says. “They know where the other one is going to be and even when I move them to different positions, they still play off of each other.”

Coming out of Christmas break as the team heads into the Class 3A, District 7 tournament this week as the No. 2 seed, Mitchell now has a team-best 32 goals in 14 games played, and Hern is right behind her with 30 (in 17 games) for the Wildcats, who are 13-3-2, including 10-1-2 in Class 3A, District 7 play.

Mitchell has notched seven hat tricks this season, including four in an 11-day span last month. Hern has four.

Their season totals rank both of them in the top 13 of all goal scorers in Florida’s Class 3A.

While 2016-17 has been the first full year that they’ve played together in high school, their connection dates back to their one season on the same team at Weightman Middle School, when Hern was an eighth-grader and Mitchell was in seventh. They only overlapped one season at Weightman, as Hern attended Stewart MS for her sixth and seventh-grade seasons, but the chemistry was in the air even then.

“It made the game easier for me, having someone like that playing forward with me,” Hern says. “That’s definitely where the chemistry started.”

Yet, it would take a few years before the pairing really started to come to fruition.

Hern played on a struggling 4-13-1 team her freshman year at WCH while Mitchell was still at Weightman.

Senior forward Bailey Hern has 30 goals, and has scored 82 in three years on varsity, with 45 assists. (Photo courtesy of TheCSSN.com)

The duo was reunited for Hern’s sophomore season, but an injury sidelined Mitchell and the two didn’t share the field much. Hern, however, burst onto the prep scene with 30 goals and 18 assists during the 2014-15 season.

“It was hard at first with Tori’s injury,” Clark says. “But, we knew what the future held with these two, one day.”

The knee injury that sidelined Mitchell for much of her freshman season also cut into her sophomore campaign last season as well. She managed to play in 11 of the team’s 14 games in 2015-16, and the pair combined for 41 goals, with Hern scoring 22 and Mitchell tallying 19.

WCH finished as the District 3A-7 runners up, dropping a 2-1 overtime loss to Pasco in the title game.

This season, the tenacious tandem is back together full time and devouring opposing defenses.

What’s more, they are both tallying up assists at a fairly impressive rate, too. Currently, Hern leads the team with 14, and Mitchell has eight.

“We know where the other one likes the ball, and we know where they’re going to run to get the ball,” Hern says.

Even when Hern has to drop back to the midfield, she still knows where Mitchell will be and where she is going.

“Bailey is so versatile, she can drop back and play midfield to help out if we have an injury,” Mitchell said. “I know she’s always looking for me and she really knows how to get me the ball.”

Both readily admit that most of their assists are to each other, but teammates like freshmen Sophia Mitchell (11 goals, six assists) and Sydney Martin (five goals, six assists) and seniors Kelly Vester (nine goals, 11 assists) and Lauren Campoe (three goals, nine assists) have helped make the offense one of the best in the Tampa Bay area.

Last season, the Wildcats scored 83 goals in 21 matches and made the 3A Regional semifinals. This season, they have found the back of the net 103 times in 18 matches, or more than 5.7 goals per game.

“Even if we make mistakes, we are able to come back from them,” Clark says. “Any time (we’ve fallen behind) 1-0 this season, it’s like we’ve come back even stronger.”

With the Mitchell-Hern combo up top, it can be tough for opponents to stay in the game. The Wildcats have won 11 of their 13 wins by at least five goals.

“This year, we have depth that we haven’t had in years past,” Clark says. “The girls that come off the bench this year, play at a higher level than the subs we’ve had in years past.”

Clark and her team hope that this pushes them over the top, namely against District 3A-7 rival Pasco. The Wildcats tied the Pirates earlier in the season and fell 5-3 two weeks later with an injury-plagued squad.

The Pirates, who went 12-0-1 in the district, will be the top seed in the 3A-7 tournament, which begins next week at Weeki Wachee High in Hernando County.

Bulls Prepping For Tough District Tourney

The Wiregrass Ranch High (WRH) girls soccer team is 11-7-5 heading into the Class 5A, District 7 tournament this week at Steinbrenner High in Tampa.

The Bulls will play the Warriors (9-2-1) in the first round of the tournament.

They went into the Christmas break on a three-game winning streak, outscoring opponents Fivay, Hudson and Ridgewood by a combined 13-0.  Freshman keeper Hanna Taugner post all three shutouts in net. The Bulls enter the 5A-7 tournament winners of seven of their past eight matches.

Junior Rylind Robinson leads the team with 13 goals and five assists, senior Sydney Chase has nine goals, and Kat Llanos has eight goals and nine assists.

Hunter’s Green Father-Son Duo Still Chasing Tennis Gold

Clint Bowles (left) and his father Jim pose with runner-up Silver Ball trophies from last month’s USTA National Clay Court Championships in Sarasota.

Hunter’s Green resident and local dentist Jim Bowles won a Big 8 doubles championship while playing for the University of Oklahoma (in Norman) in 1972, but 45 years later, he says it is his latest tennis quest that gives him the most pleasure.

One of Hunter’s Green Country Club’s best players, Bowles, 64, recently teamed up with his 28-year-old son Clint to finish second at the USTA National Father-Son clay court championships at The Landings Racquet Club in Sarasota.

For Jim and Clint, it was another tantalizingly close finish in their fifth attempt to win a Golden Ball together.

In 2012, their first year playing in national championship tournaments together, the duo finished second and won a Silver Ball. That was followed by consecutive consolation round wins and a Bronze Ball in 2015 after a third-place finish.

On Nov. 20, Jim and Clint made the final again before falling to Jerry and Brett Morse-Karzen of Wilmette, IL by a 6-4, 7-6 score. Jim says he and Clint didn’t convert on a couple of crucial break points in the second set, dooming their upset bid.

“Clint said, ‘Dad, we’re going to win one one of these days,’” Jim said, chuckling. “I said, ‘Well, let’s hurry up. The sun is setting.’”

It won’t be easy. The Morse-Karzens are the all-time leaders in USTA National Father-Son championships, have beaten the Bowles duo all four times they have met, and their win was their fourth straight national title on clay.

Oh, and there’s this: Jerry Morse-Karzen is 6 feet, 5 inches tall, and his son Brett is 6’10”.

Meanwhile, both Jim and Clint are around 5’9”.

“We call them the twin towers,’’ Jim said of the Morse-Karzen duo. “The son can just stand at the end and stretch out his arms and cover the whole court. It’s tough when you’re giving away that much height.”

But, the Bowles duo will keep on trying. It’s in the family’s blood — Jim’s wife Joy is also an accomplished tennis player, and younger son Spencer was a baseball standout at Wiregrass Ranch High before playing at Saint Leo University near Dade City.

Jim grew up in Shawnee, OK, playing football, baseball and basketball. A knee injury in junior high put him on the sidelines for awhile, and one of his substitute teachers talked him into giving tennis a try.

“He was like the pied piper of tennis,’’ Jim recalled. “He was the type of guy who stayed after you. If you didn’t show up for a while, he would call and ask you where you’ve been and tell you he had a kid there he thought could beat you.”

Jim says he never looked back after taking up tennis. While earning a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Oklahoma, he also played on the Sooners’ tennis team, where his serve-and-volley style helped win a Big 8 (now Big 12) championship in doubles.

When Clint was born, Jim started him on tennis almost immediately. However, because they were living in Wyoming at the time, the tennis competition was subpar, and Clint gravitated to his other favorite sport, hockey.

It wasn’t until the Bowles family moved to Hunter’s Green 21 years ago that Clint’s tennis talent fully emerged.

After spending some time at the Saddlebrook Tennis Academy, Clint ended up training under renowned coach Nick Saviano, a former Stanford University All-American who has coached Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) stars Sloane Stephens and Eugenie Bouchard and other top players.

Within four months of training with Saviano, Clint, a lefty with what Jim proudly calls “world-class baseline strokes,” captured his first Gold Ball, winning the national clay court title in the 14-year-old division in 2003.

In 2005, Clint was 16 years old when he captured his second Gold Ball, winning the 18s on the hard courts. In 2007, he won another national clay court title in the 18s before attending Florida State University in Tallahassee.

As a Seminole, Clint was named to the All-Atlantic Coast Conference team twice while finishing third on FSU’s all-time singles wins list with 92.

With Jim — who also earned his D.D.S. degree from the University of Oklahoma Dental School — working as a dentist at Family, Implant & Cosmetic Dentistry in The Walk at Highwoods Preserve, and Clint teaching at Saviano High Performance Tennis in Fort Lauderdale, tennis time together is sparse.

The times they get to play together at nationals, Jim says, are special.

“It’s a chance to spend some quality time with him and re-connect,’’ Jim says. “We have a great time. We laugh on the court…we’ll look at each other funny if one of us hits a weird shot. I really enjoy it.”

Jim pauses for a second, and then smiles, adding, “Then again, when you win something, it’s even more fun.”

“We really, really look forward to it every year,’’ Clint says. “We get to play in a super national tournament against the best in our age group, it’s really close to home and it’s my birthday week. That makes it a great trip.”

Having won three Silver Balls together, Jim says that Clint is working hard at getting him his first gold one.

“Quite honestly, in the middle years (at the USTA Nationals where the tandem won the consolation bracket and finished third) Clint wasn’t really playing that much and wasn’t all that fired up to play,’’ Jim says. “But this year, he was highly motivated. He practiced, he’d call me and ask, “Hey dad, how are you doing? You practicing? How’s your serve?’”

Jim admits that his best chance to win a Gold Ball probably was the first year he and Clint competed together. They lost 6-4, 4-6, 6-4. They also finished second that year at the hard court finals in California.

After this year’s narrow loss in the final, Clint texted his dad and promised he’d get him a championship.

“The father-son doubles, it just creates a special bond between the father and son,’’ Clint says. “It’s really fun to go out and play with him. It makes it that much more enjoyable to play for him, try to win it (with) him.”

He adds, “I promised him we’re going to win at least one Gold Ball. Now I have to live up to that promise and follow through on it.”