Prep softball: Fourth-seeded Rocklin continues to surge, thumps McClatchy in playoffs

The Rocklin softball team started this season 6-8.

That wasn’t a shock. The Thunder lost gobs of talent from last spring, when they clearly had the best team in the Sacramento area. It was going to take some time to rebuild.

It took about a month, apparently.

Fourth-seeded Rocklin hammered McClatchy 12-0 Tuesday in the first round of the Sac-Joaquin Section Division I playoffs. It was the Thunder’s 11th win in their last 14 games. Wrapped up in that streak: a pair of wins over Folsom, the No. 2 seed.

Leading the surge is senior pitcher Brielle Wright, who pitched four perfect innings Tuesday to keep the game with McClatchy a scoreless tie. After the Rocklin offense broke out with 12 runs in the bottom of the fourth – with 16 players coming to bat – coach Mallory Asaro said the Thunder are very dangerous.

“I absolutely think this team can beat anybody on the right day,” she said. “We just have a lot of facets to our game. We have speed. You know we have power. And like I said, when (Brielle) is on a mission, she’s not going to lose. We saw that this year, we played a night game against Whitney. And … she just refused. And I think when we have that mindset, we can beat anybody.”

It’s been a learning experience to get to this point for Rocklin, which lost a lineup full of seniors to graduation last spring. With no section playoffs to work toward because of the pandemic, most teams went with young lineups to build for the next season. Not the Thunder, who sent players to UCLA and Boise State on scholarships.

But that left this year’s team trying to build an identity. Sophomore Sydney Barker is happy to help with that. She’s already a vocal leader. Asaro says Barker is “a senior for four years, basically.”

Barker chirped up during the postgame huddle Tuesday to remind teammates to ice up and drink water. During the game, it was Barker who delivered a two-RBI double during the wild 12-run fourth inning. After she landed on second, with Rocklin leading 5-0, Barker turned to her dugout and started yelling “let’s go” at her teammates. The next six batters all reached base safely as Rocklin put the game out of reach.

Asaro tells anybody on the Rocklin roster that it doesn’t matter what year they are in school, only that they’re playing on the varsity team. That’s all the encouragement Barker needed.

“Ever since freshman year. I’ve just been super comfortable with everyone and grown really great relationships with the girls and the coaches,” she said. “And it’s just really great to have that relationship and just being so comfortable around everybody. That shows my true personality and how comfortable I am with everyone.”

Wright, a senior pitcher, also looked exceedingly comfortable in the circle Tuesday. She didn’t allow a base runner in four innings of work; teammate Marissa Robertson came in and struck out the side in the fifth to finish off the perfect game.

It was a tough finish for McClatchy coach Chris Abar, who said he dealt with more adversity this season than ever in his decade-plus of work. A teacher strike shut down all practices and games for a week and a half. COVID-19 caused roster problems. And the Lions’ offense relies on walks, errors and bunt singles to apply pressure on teams; none of that was happening against Wright on Tuesday.

“She did a good job at mixing the ball or mixing her pitches. She used the rise ball efficiently. You know, she’s a pitcher that will use it early in the count, the next inning it will come late in the count, so we couldn’t really get a bead on it,” Abar said. “We have girls in our dugout that track pitches. You know, here’s what she typically throws, and she was just very hard to figure out.”

Now McClatchy will rely on its underclassmen stepping up next season to continue the school’s softball success. Rocklin moved on to play Tracy in the second round Thursday.

Watch out, softball world. The Thunder are figuring this thing out.

“I think we’re a dangerous team. … With our team and our camaraderie we definitely have what it takes,” Barker said.

This story was originally published May 18, 2022 at 6:17 AM.