TRUMBULL—It was the day after Easter and the Trumbull softball team had just suffered its fifth loss in seven games.
Veteran head coach Jacqui Sheftz, who is in her 25th year coaching the sport, looked at her remaining schedule and tried to do the math.
“To be really honest, when we were 2-5, I sat down with my coaching staff and said, ‘I don’t know if I could find eight (wins) to get us to the state tournament,” Sheftz admitted. “We were just not gelling. We were not playing good softball at the time. We had good moments and then we would implode like young teams do.”
On Tuesday, the Trumbull High School softball field will host the FCIAC semifinals. Forty-eight hours later, it will host the league championship game, as well.
Despite the slow start, and despite not having a single senior on its roster this spring, Trumbull is one of the last four teams standing in the FCIAC. The Eagles are joined by top-seeded St. Joseph, third-seeded Darien, and fifth-seeded New Canaan.
Over the weekend, the seventh-seeded Eagles stunned No. 2 Norwalk and posted a 5-2 quarterfinal victory. Trumbull, a team that is now 13-8 after turning its season around, will play Darien as the away team on its home field.
Sheftz admitted the school hosting the latter half of the tournament provided extra motivation for the Eagles.
“I don’t want to be flipping burgers. I want my team to play in the semifinals. That’s true,” Sheftz said. “So that was a huge motivating factor for them, too, because how embarrassing would that be? You’re hosting, your facility is hosting, then you’re not here and we’re working the concession stand and selling 50-50 raffles. I mean, right there, I think when the kids heard that, they didn’t want to be in that position.”
Two days after Sheftz and her staff tried to map a way into the state tournament, the Eagles came together and started to soar.
A 14-0 win over Brien McMahon started a modest three-game winning streak. After a 1-0 loss to Darien, Trumbull rattled off five more wins.
Since the 2-5 start, the Eagles have finished the season with an 11-3 mark, going from a wait-until-next-year team into a why-not-us? championship contender.
“Coming into the season, we knew we had a lot of potential,” junior center fielder Kylie Lucia said. “We had a lot of young kids that we had to grow up to meet our level. We knew that we had a lot of talent and when the pieces clicked together, we knew we’d be really good. It was just about finding that trust within each other. From there it kind of just clicked and we just went forward.”
The biggest question mark for the Eagles was: With no seniors, where would the leadership come from?
It starts with the five juniors in the starting lineup—Lucia, pitcher Madison Pippa, first baseman Maren Jones, shortstop Brianna Potok and third baseman Ella Ferris.
“Obviously we are very team-oriented,” said Jones. “We make sure we’re holding each other accountable without it getting in the way of things. I think we’ve all come together as a team, and we have each other’s back.”
As Sheftz is not afraid to point out, the freshmen are also holding their older teammates accountable, as well.
One of the reasons she didn’t name captains this season was to empower the different voices she has in her dugout.
“We don’t have captains on this team because we are empowering the freshmen to have a voice in our post-game huddle or during practice,” Sheftz said. “The freshmen are holding juniors accountable. It is a win-win for us.”
The juniors have more than accepted that, Jones said. In fact, they’ve embraced it.
“We made sure the freshmen knew they had a voice,” she said. “A freshman can say something, a junior can say something, a sophomore can say something, anyone is open to say anything. We all were able to just have a voice. We bonded. We all had a part in it and I think it helped bond us a team.”
Coming into the season with no seniors was a daunting task for the Class of 2026, but Potok said her class is a group that always had great leaders above them showing them the way. Now it is their turn.
“It’s definitely a lot of pressure, especially because we didn’t have a great start to the season, but I think we all really came together and we showed that we are leaders,” Potok said. “We really took the underclassmen under our wings and helped them develop and now we’ve really come together as a team to start winning some games.”
Four of those freshmen—catcher Julia Terry, second baseman Harper Delaney, and outfielders Lia Solustri and Ashlyn Delaney—were in the starting line-up alongside the five juniors when they knocked off Norwalk.
“It really came down to the girls, this junior class, taking charge and saying, we didn’t sign up for this,” Sheftz said. “This is not how things are going to be done. And it was a matter of winning one game at a time. They didn’t give up and they just continued to build.”
In the circle, Pippa, an All-FCIAC second team selection a year ago, shared the spotlight with recent THS graduate Becca Sexton. This year, though, the ball is hers and while she was struggling with some health issues early in the season, Pippa took the team’s start personally.
“I mean at the beginning of the season, just us as a team, we weren’t doing so hot,” Pippa said. “It was pretty frustrating. I mean me not doing so hot and we were getting down on ourselves. It’s just something that we needed to work on, but then we found our confidence.”
None of the Eagles could pin-point one singular moment when the lightbulb went on.
“I don’t think it was a specific moment,” Ferris said. “We just kind of kept building and working. We kind of worked on what we needed, but then it brought all of us together as a team.”
One pitch at a time. One inning at a time. One game at a time.
When the Eagles get to their home field tomorrow, they won’t be thinking about Thursday’s FCIAC championship game. Nor will they be eyeing a deep run in the state tournament.
All that matters is Darien.
“We really take things one game at a time and I think that’s how and why we’ve been really playing well lately,” Potok said. “We haven’t been thinking too far ahead.”
The day after Easter, had the Trumbull players looked ahead, had the path to the state tournament seemed that daunting, perhaps the Eagles would have become a team that never found its voice.
Instead, from the junior class, to the freshmen class that has joined the Trumbull program, these Eagles have found their voices and it has allowed them to fly.
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