Bloomfield softball comes up short in Class 4A finals

RIO RANCHO, N.M.

Trusting one another was the most important element that made up the Bloomfield softball team.

The Lady Bobcats used a series of exercises as a way to build that trust.

Those exercises worked wonders for Bloomfield as they entered the New Mexico Class 4A state softball tournament as the top seed while riding a 17-game winning streak.

“At the beginning of the season we didn’t play so well but as the season progressed we learned to work as a team,” Bloomfield leftfielder Chelsey Largo said.

In one of those exercises, Largo said they played “holding the rope” in which they imagined themselves hanging from the edge of a cliff with a rope and the only thing preventing them from falling is the person on the other end.

That exercise encouraged them to trust each other and that played a role during their winning streak.

At this year’s playoffs, the Bobcats extended that streak to 20 before they ran into a good Silver team in the semifinals of the winner’s bracket that featured the top two seeds.

In a game that stretched eight hours due to inclement weather, the Silver Lady Colts ended Bloomfield’s impressive winning steak with a 10-1 win that sent the Bobcats into the loser’s bracket of the double elimination tournament.

The tournament’s top seed, however, worked its way to the finals by outlasting Cobre 9-6 before they fell short to the Colts 8-3 in Saturday’s championship game.

“Defensively, we played much better,” Bloomfield coach Andi Clark said of their second meeting with Sliver. “We started to bat more than that first game. I think we just played a lot better today.”

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