Unfinished Business: Philipsburg-Osceola softball seniors leave without another chance to reclaim PIAA title
Editor’s note: This is the final installment in a series chronicling some of the biggest missed storylines of the 2020 spring high school sports season in Centre County.
Kylie Adams struggled to find the words to describe what her spring was like.
She was set to be the No. 1 starting pitcher for the Philipsburg-Osceola softball team in her final season with the team. She was supposed to graduate with games left to play as the team made a run in state tournament. She was supposed to get the recognition she’d worked years to earn.
Instead, Adams found herself waiting around, trying to find ways to pass time. She was supposed to be somewhere else.
“It’s just strange not practicing every day,” Adams said. “I’m used to practicing for six days a week and pitching for hours at a time. It’s just very strange.”
Adams, Adria Lewis and Roselyn Weaver were set to lead the Mounties as seniors in head coach Steve Frank’s first season at the helm. Frank is tasked with replacing Philipsburg-Osceola legend Jim Gonder, who retired as the team’s head coach at the end of the 2019 season. Gonder racked up 36 titles in his 37 years, including 20 Mountain League titles, 13 District 6 championships and three PIAA championships.
Frank was ready to show he was a more than capable replacement for the legend, but instead, was left wondering what could have been for his first team after the spring sports season was canceled by the PIAA due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Missing out on his first season as head coach made the news of the lost season especially disappointing for Frank.
“We were set for this year,” he said.
His first season was set to follow Gonder and the Mounties’ co-Mountain League title with Bald Eagle Area, who went on to reach the PIAA state title game last year. The senior class was ready to build off that performance and try to reclaim the PIAA state title after it won the 2018 iteration as sophomores.
Without that opportunity the three seniors were left, instead, with a void.
The first-time head coach felt the worst for those girls, who earned their final chance in the spotlight but will never get it, especially Adams, who waited patiently for her opportunity to step to the forefront as the team’s No. 1 starter.
“I felt really bad for them,” Frank said. “Especially Kylie. She’s been in the background waiting for her chance to be the No. 1 pitcher, and it was going to be this year. I felt terrible for them.”
Adams, Lewis and Weaver were all trying to prepare for the possibility of not having a season, but still didn’t want to accept that it could happen. Then the news came, and they had to rationalize what happened.
The initial reaction to the canceled season by the seniors was relatively uniform. Differing variations of sadness and frustration manifested in the trio when the news initially broke that their senior years, and seasons, would be canceled.
Weaver’s reaction, in particular, was visceral and overwhelming.
“I bawled my eyes out,” Weaver said. “You work your butt off your whole life to get a season that you’ve been waiting for. Then for it just to be canceled and thrown away like that, it’s disappointing.”
It’s difficult to blame her for feeling that way. The senior first baseman put years of time and effort in with her teammates, and now it was gone in the blink of an eye. There wasn’t a last hurrah to share with them. Lewis had been looking forward to that time with her teammates.
She wanted to take one more chance at finding the ultimate success with her friends that she’d spent a decade playing with.
“Some of those people we’ve been playing with since we were 8 years old,” Lewis said. “All of a sudden we won’t be able to play with them one last time. It was just sad.”
Frank wanted to console his players and let them know how much he cared. He felt for their losses. He cared that they wouldn’t have their final opportunity to play, and their first opportunity to play for him. But even he was in shock.
How could a first-time coach prepare for a pandemic completely canceling the season? He couldn’t.
“I couldn’t believe that this stuff would happen in our lifetime,” Frank said. “It blows my mind that something like this could ever happen.”
His message was ultimately to learn from this missed opportunity and to be grateful that they had their health in times that it isn’t assured. He wanted his players to know that nothing in life is guaranteed. Not even the things people often take for granted, like finality.
Adams ultimately found the words to describe what she was feeling in the days following the cancellation. For Weaver, those words never came. She took a deep breath. She paused. She searched. But in the end, she didn’t know.
“I don’t know if I really have words to explain how I was feeling,” she said. “It’s just a feeling you don’t ever really get.”
Her response serves as an emblem for the spring sports season in the state.
Confusion, frustration, sadness, and then, nothing.
This story was originally published June 21, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
