Cranston East softball might want to change its nickname because it's been electric in 2024

CRANSTON — Her team was three outs from matching last season’s win total, but before they ran out on the field, Jordan McHale wanted to leave her team with one final message.

“Right now your softball IQ is off the charts,” McHale said to her team. “And you showed it in that inning.”

Freshman pitcher Izzy Sousa led Cranston East softball team out on the field and then closed out a 6-0 win over Tiverton in a game in which the Thunderbolts played the type of softball McHale envisioned when she took over as head coach last spring.

“From freshman year from going from zero wins, to sophomore year, a couple wins, and now we’re still undefeated,” Cranston East junior center fielder Nevaeh Fatorma said. “It feels amazing.”

“Everything is just clicking for us,” Sousa said. “Our team chemistry is insane. We come to every single game super hyped up and it’s just so much fun to be on this team.”

Cranston East’s secret isn’t much of a secret.

Offensively, there isn’t a team in Rhode Island that plays the way Cranston East does. The Thunderbolts turned Friday’s game against the Tigers into a track meet, showing off their speed on the basepaths and embracing their identity as a small-ball softball team.

Fatorma set the tone in the first inning. An expert slap hitter, Fatorma hit an infield single on a routine grounder to short, blazing her way down the first-base line and beating the throw by a mile.

She stole second, took third on a passed ball, and then scored on a single by Mariah Means-Waldorf.

It went on like this the rest of the game. Someone would reach. When they weren’t stealing bases the traditional way, they waited for Tiverton’s defense to lose focus for half a second — leaving a base uncovered, turning their head to the runner or lollipopping a throw back to the pitcher — and just took them.

Cranston East applied constant pressure, forcing Tiverton into mistakes and putting up runs in every inning someone reached base.

The Thunderbolts scored three in the second — two on a RBI single by Means-Waldorf — added one in the fourth on an infield single by Fatorma and put the game away in the bottom of the sixth, scoring another with two outs on another slap single that plated Lexi Montalbon for the game’s final run.

“We do this so we try to [force the defense to] make errors, we try to get those extra bases, we try to get those extra runs,” Sousa said. “As a pitcher, if I see a team doing this to me, it immediately scares me.

“Doing this is a big key in creating fear and making them make those errors and ultimately leading to extra runs for us.”

Softball used to be all about smallball, but when the circle was moved back, it changed teams’ offensive approach. McHale was a small-ball player in her time at Johnston and Southern Connecticut State University and, with the type of players she has at Cranston East, wanted her team to be built with the small-ball mindset.

“We’ve been giving them that mindset and it’s been working great,” McHale said. “But the energy has been something different this year.

“It’s a total game-changer because the energy stays high the entire game.

The lineup card, 1-9, is built with players who have similar skillsets — short, compact contact hitters who can run. Some swing better than others, some are faster than others, but they all have the same approach — take risks on the base paths and force the defense to make the play.

It’s been building all season, but McHale said Friday's game was the first time she really saw it all come together, where her players were doing everything on their own without being told.

“It’s not only that we have fast runners — we think fast,” Sousa said. “Taking that extra base, especially in this game, is what leads to those extra runs and ultimately ends in the wins.

“Our softball IQ is top-notch right now.”

“That’s the only way they’re going to fully learn the game of softball as well,” McHale said. “We’ve slowly just been taking more and more risks and they’re doing it by themselves now."

The offense is electric, but it’s not the only thing that’s turned Cranston East’s program around this spring.

Sousa has been nothing short of phenomenal. She pitches with confidence and command and has toyed with Division III hitters all season long. On Tuesday, she had her best game of the season, throwing no-hitter while striking out 15 against Pawtucket, a team on the short list of Division III favorites.

She didn’t get a no-no on Friday, but this performance might have been better against the only offense that comes close to rivaling Cranston East’s. Sousa gave up two hits — singles by Tiverton’s Sara Poland in the fourth and sixth — didn’t walk a batter and struck out 13, celebrating the end of every inning with catcher Estrella Rivas before heading to the between-inning huddle.

“It’s huge because it allows us to develop other places,” McHale said. “It’s not that she’s just a great pitcher; she’s a great kid. She comes in working every day, giving 100 percent, and she’s not a random pitcher that walked on to the team.”

“I put some pressure on myself, but I know my defense has my back at all times,” said Sousa, who participates in the same freshman cleanup duties as her classmates on the team. “I put pressure on myself, but I know that if I make a mistake or something happens where I put a pitch over the middle or something, my defense is going to have my back 100 percent of the time.”

Last spring was a huge season for Cranston East, which went 7-9 in Division III, its most league wins since going 12-4 in the 24-team Division II in 2016. Friday’s win puts the Thunderbolts at 7-0 in D-III and with two wins over Tiverton, last week’s win over Pawtucket and mercy-rule wins over the rest of the division, has them as the favorite in the division at midseason.

“We go one game at a time,” Fatorma said. “We’ve been talking about a championship a little bit and we think we’ll make it there.”

“We’ve looked at playoffs but definitely we take one game at a time. We take no team lightly,” Sousa said. “We come with the same energy to every single game. We focus on the game in front of us and then the game in front of us.“Winning every single game is crucial right now.”

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Cranston East the favorite to win D-III softball after beating Tiverton