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Softball: Naples High seniors making final statement
LEXEY SWALL-BOBAY / Daily News
Third baseman Erin Beal, above, and center fielder Ashley Pinkerton race to retrieve balls during practice Wednesday evening at Naples High School. The team is preparing for the Class 4A state semi-final game against South Lake High School on Friday in Plant City.
LEXEY SWALL-BOBAY / Daily News
Erin Beal, a third baseman for the Naples High School softball team jokes with teammates after practice Wednesday evening at Naples High School. The team is preparing for the Class 4A state semi-final game against South Lake High School on Friday in Plant City.
Up next
Naples (26-3) vs. Groveland-South Lake (21-5)
WHAT: Class 4A semifinal
WHEN: Friday, 5 p.m. (Winner plays Pembroke Pines Charter/Baker County winner in state final at 1 p.m. Saturday)
WHERE: Plant City Stadium
ADMISSION: $8
DIRECTIONS: Take I-75 North to Exit 261 (Interstate 4 East toward Orlando); Follow I-4 East for 13.8 miles to Exit 22, Park Road; Turn right onto Park Road (553 South) and follow for 2.8 miles to stadium. Total trip is approximately 180 miles from Naples (2 hours, 45 minutes).
RADIO: Friday on WVOI/1480-AM, Saturday (if necessary) on WCNZ/1660-AM
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STORY TOOLS
RELATED STORIES
Related Links
More PrepZone
- Local golf: Naples' Santos-Ocampo loses first-round match at U.S. Amateur
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Ashley Pinkerton is The Quiet One.
Erin Beal is, in the words of coach Robert Iamurri, The Opinionated One.
“She’s good at making a polite point but being sure it’s heard,” the Naples High coach said of his senior third baseman. “Just very nonchalant. The good part about Erin, if something’s not right, she’ll put it just the right way to make sure we shift gears and do something different.”
For all their differences on the field and in the Golden Eagles’ dugout, though, the only two seniors on a 26-3 team driving for its state-record 10th championship interpreted their coach’s preseason challenge the exact same way.
“He’s talked for a while about the tradition this program has,” Beal remembered. “It was definitely a challenge. He realized that Pink and I were going to be the first two seniors (over Iamurri’s 23-year tenure) to not make it to a final four. That made us want to get there even more.”
For his part, Iamurri labeled that moment a verbal commitment, a promise that “we, as a coaching staff, are going to be as prepared as we can be. What this team didn’t have in talent, we were going to have in knowledge to give those two every opportunity.”
What no one’s arguing, though, is that these Golden Eagles have worked for that chance, having won 18 straight (16 via shutout) including the program’s first regional title in four years with a 4-2 win over defending Class 4A champ Lake Wales last week.
“It was the greatest feeling ever,” Pinkerton, the team’s center fielder, said of payback for a 1-0 loss that ended Naples’ previously perfect 2007. “That was a tough loss. We were undefeated and it was kind of unexpected. This year, my goal was to get past that regional championship. I figured we’d be playing them again and we played a great game. It was awesome.”
The victory was especially sweet for the two seniors, who celebrated their trip to Friday’s semifinals in Plant City with an on-field embrace.
Beal and Pinkerton have been teammates for the better part of a decade, having first played together in Little League and travel ball, then later as the only two members from the Class of ‘08 on Iamurri’s often-dominant teams.
It’s made them close friends, in spite of the fact that Pinkerton “leads by example,” Beal said, while the third baseman talks so much “that there’s a joke on the team that she’s gonna run out of the words she’s been given,” the center fielder said with a laugh.
“Whenever I have a problem, I go and talk to her,” said Pinkerton, the club leader in batting average (.539), hits (49) and runs (35). “She’s my best friend on this team. I can always tell her stuff and she’s someone I know I can always go to. That’s an awesome feeling.”
The two aren’t part of the smallest senior class Iamurri has had — believe it or not, there were a few years with a lone 12th-grader — but the impact they have on their teammates is still a unique one.
The two are far less vocal than their predecessors, they said, in part because it doesn’t fit their respective personalities, but largely because of the experience of the Naples underclassmen.
“They don’t need somebody who’s on their back all the time, saying, ‘This is what you need to do,’ ” said Beal, who is hitting .397 and leads Naples with nine extra-base hits. “They can take responsibility for themselves, and even though you can tell that they kind of look (to us) to step up, we don’t need to say, ‘Here’s what you do.’ We’ve been able to just be part of the team because everybody knows their job.”
It’s fostered what Pinkerton called a “one big family” atmosphere, and with no hierarchy, Iamurri said everyone — from the starters to the rarely used substitutes — are comfortable expressing their opinion.
“That might be why we’re doing what we’re doing as a team, as far as overachieving,” he said. “You see everybody in the same T-shirts and the same shorts. In a day and age where everybody worries about the individual, this is a unique group.”
So even while Beal and Pinkerton blend into that group, there’s no escaping that this weekend’s trip, which starts with a Friday evening faceoff against Groveland-South Lake (21-5) for the right to play in Saturday’s state championship, has special meaning for the two seniors.
Beal will hang up her spikes when she heads to the University of Florida in the fall, while Pinkerton, who has been accepted to the honors college at the University of Central Florida, acknowledged that walking onto the softball program might be piling too much onto a freshman’s plate.
“This is the grand finale,” Beal said, “but if you’ve gotta go out, what better way? It’s fitting that it will be me and Ashley together at the end. She’s been there since we were 8 or 9, and it just fits that she’ll be there at the finish, too.”
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