EAST SYRACUSE – Take one element out of the 2024 season for the Baldwinsville softball team, and it was quite successful, with 14 victories and a real opportunity to add the first-ever Section III Class AAA championship to the Class AA title it won a year ago.
Yet that single element – namely, the presence of Cicero-North Syracuse – altered the narrative.
Three times this spring, the Bees met the Northstars and could not win any of them, the last of these an 8-5 defeat in Wednesday night’s sectional Class AAA semifinal at Carrier Park.
As it turned out, the playoff seeding mattered a lot. A points system put Liverpool into the top seed despite a 10-7 regular-season mark worse than B’ville’s 14-4, and the fact that those two sides split their regular-season meetings.
This meant the no. 3 seed Bees would, in order to get to the final against the Warriors (who beat Rome Free Academy 8-0 in the other semifinal), have to turn it around against no. 2 seed C-NS, who had prevailed over B’ville 3-0 in April and 3-2 earlier in May.
Again, the Northstars got out in front following a one-hour weather delay, pushing across single runs in the first and second innings, but that 2-0 lead did not hold.
In the top of the third, the Bees got to C-NS pitcher Kiyara Bembry and relief replacement Maya Owens for five runs, two of them coming home on a Bella Hotchkiss home run in between run-scoring hits by Marissa McCloud and Brooke Nicholson.
Owens settled down, though, and for the rest of the game kept B’ville off the board and only allowed two hits in her five-inning stint.
Staked to that 5-2 lead, Hotchkiss saw it disappear in the bottom of the fourth. C-NS put together its own five-run rally, keyed by hits from Sydney Rockwell and Paige Pangaro, who both finished with a pair of RBIs.
Try as it could, B’ville could not answer it, and it was the Northstars who would get Liverpool in Friday’s final and the Bees seeing an historic senior class led by Hotchkiss, Leah VerSchneider, Brooke Nicholson, Maddy Gulich and Layla Trendowski depart, leaving big questions as to who will take their spots in 2025.
