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Concord senior Olivia Crawford has two words written in Sharpie on her softball visor: Unfinished Business.
Her sophomore year, the Tide lost in the Division I championship game to Salem. Her junior year, they lost in the championship to Exeter. The latter, a 1-0 loss in eight innings.
Entering play on Wednesday, Concord sits at 13-1 on the season, once again near the top of the standings. A rematch of last year’s championship awaits at Memorial Field against unbeaten Exeter, but the Tide have loftier goals than just winning on Wednesday. With head coach Duke Sawyer in his 23rd year leading the program, Concord hopes that this is the season to finally add that seventh state title and the first since 2018.
“It’s a very talented group from 1 to 14 on this team,” he said. “That’s what makes it unique. The bench is as good as the players I have out there. Lots of teams have seven, eight, nine really good players, and then the rest sort of fill in, but this team is loaded from top to bottom.
“They’re all softball nuts. They play a lot.”
Attend a Tide softball game and witness the palpable energy emanating from the third base dugout; attend a Tide softball practice and see the players running drills themselves, almost on autopilot. As Sawyer said: “They have ideas they want to do and drills they want to do, and that’s what I want. My drills are probably a hundred years old to them.”
So what’s it like to be part of this team? What are the keys to the Tide’s success? What will it take to hoist that championship plaque? The players shared their thoughts. Some quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity.
The current juniors and seniors have accomplished something few do in their varsity high school careers: play in back-to-back championship games. Even fewer have the chance to play in a third.
Clearing that hurdle, avenging the losses to Salem and Exeter and receiving that championship plaque remain top of mind this season.
Delaney Duford, junior catcher: A lot of us have been on the team since my freshman year. We lost to Salem, and then last year we lost to Exeter. So now that’s two, and I think a lot of us are like, “Third time’s the charm.” We have that mindset of, “No one’s beating us this year.”
Sarah Taylor, junior pitcher/third baseman: The first time we lost to Salem you’re like, “I don’t want to feel like that,” and then it happened again, and it hurts even more. This year, we were like, “We don’t want to feel like that for a third time.” It just sucks. It hurts.
Kennedy Craigue, senior outfielder: Last year was tough. The 1-0 loss to Exeter, it was wicked tough. Coming in this year, everyone here, even the first-year varsity players, they have that fire. We want it badly. We wanted it badly the first year, we wanted it even more badly last year and now we’re dying for one. We’re all working really hard.
Concord graduated just two seniors – Kyleigh Gray and Elizabeth Blinn – from last year’s team and returned nine players, including three seniors and five juniors. Foremost among them are junior pitchers Sarah Taylor and Maddy Wachter, the Tide’s two anchors in the circle.
Both 2022 First Team All-State pitchers, they’ve picked up where they left off last season. Through Monday’s game, Taylor is 6-0 with a 0.62 ERA and has 73 strikeouts and just six walks in 34 innings pitched; Wachter – who set a Tide record on Monday with 18 strikeouts against Bishop Guertin – is 6-1 with a 1.05 ERA, 86 strikeouts and five walks in 40 innings.
Olivia Crawford, senior outfielder: It’s very comforting to know we have our pitchers who are going to take care of things. That works amazing for us.
Delaney Duford: I think it relaxes the team. You know when our pitchers go out there that they’re going to put their best foot forward and that they trust their team as much as the team trusts them. Not many teams can fully, 100% say that they have that.
Kennedy Craigue: Either one of them can pitch against any team. It’s great against the better teams because any good hitting lineup is going to catch on to a pitcher the first or second time through the lineup. So, the first one can pitch the first few innings, and then if (the other team) starts hitting them, you bring in the other one. They’re both different enough where then the team has to readjust.
Paired with the dynamic duo in the circle, Duford’s the stabilizer behind the plate, having caught both Taylor and Wachter since they were about 8 years old.
All three of them made the Concord varsity team as freshmen, the first time Sawyer’s ever taken three first-years on his roster. The unspoken communication and trust they’ve developed through roughly a decade of playing together doesn’t often materialize like this at the high school level.
Maddy Wachter, junior pitcher: I’ve been pitching to Delaney for nine, 10 years. When she calls a pitch, we know that she has trust in us when we’re throwing it. She knows what pitches are going to work best for us, she has a really good read with us and she really helps us dig deep to be able to have that trust in ourselves.
Sarah Taylor: She knows me better than I know myself. She knows when I start to get into a funk to take a timeout, maybe come over, tell a joke. I don’t find them hilarious in the moment, but then I can laugh about it later. She just knows what to do when it comes to me.
Kennedy Craigue: Delaney’s a beast. She’s a brick wall back there. Nothing gets by her. It instills a lot of confidence in a lot of us, especially in the field.
Off the field, the group almost unanimously mentioned Arnie’s as the go-to for ice cream as a team. Less unanimous, though, are the go-to orders.
Sarah Taylor: I love black raspberry. I don’t know if everyone likes that.
Maddy Wachter: Ooh. Oof. Doesn’t surprise me.
Olivia Crawford: I’m a plain girl. I like vanilla, chocolate. Sometimes I’ll mix it up and go Oreo.
Delaney Duford: The peanut butter cup cookie dough flurry. Ice cream’s our thing. We love going to get ice cream.
The Tide also love bus rides to road games, more than the average team. It’s an opportunity for some karaoke or – more bluntly – very loud singing, while Sawyer sits quietly at the front of the bus. He’s done this for a while now; he knows the live concerts are part of the job.
Sarah Taylor: We love to sing. We’ll take song requests from girls on varsity and girls on JV, and everyone sings. It’s so fun.
Maddy Wachter: A lot of high energy, a lot of pump-up songs. We like to sing louder than the speakers, sing louder than each other.
Olivia Crawford: We’re just having fun. You don’t want to go into a game quiet, so we make sure we’re all pumped up listening to music we all know. We sing. It’s just a good time on the bus.
Andie Moreira, sophomore outfielder: (Coach) is probably sitting there thinking, “Wow, I can’t wait to get off this bus.” I think he just sits there and tries to ignore us while we do our own thing.
Kennedy Craigue: Coach loves the song “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” It’s the first song on our playlist when we warm up, and he comes and sings it with us. He’s been doing it forever, so it’s a fun little tradition.
Olivia Crawford: We’ll be warming up, and we’ll look over, and he’ll be lip-synching it.
With the playoffs quickly approaching, the Tide players know when to put the microphones aside for their gloves and bats. Concord has four regular season games remaining before the postseason begins on May 31.
For the current seniors and juniors, the two straight championship defeats lights the fire as the playoffs near. For the entire roster, though, it’s the collective spirit and togetherness the group plays with that will push them across the finish line.
Sarah Taylor: Everyone wants to get better, everyone wants to compete with each other in a healthy, good way, but everyone’s also there to pick everybody up when things don’t go the way they’re expected to go. Some teams come with really selfish players, and I don’t think we really have any of those on our team.
Kennedy Craigue: A lot of us grew up playing together, so we all have a deep connection through softball and friendship. We’ve all known each other forever. It’s a really special group. Everyone is just so happy to be here and play together, and that’s what I’m going to remember.
Olivia Crawford: Obviously, we’re here to get better and get better as a team together, but at the end of the day, we’re all just having fun. We’re doing something we love to do, something we love to do together.
Andie Moreira: (It’s) my second year with them as a sophomore, they really make sure you stay on your toes. They make me excited for when I’m in their shoes, and I get to help underclassmen like they’ve been helping me.
Delaney Duford: It’s a great group of girls. Coaches are great. It’s just fun to represent your town. Some people go to prep school; some people choose to do other things. But when you’re representing the town you grew up in, it’s an immense amount of pride that you carry with you when you play.
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