Saraland coach Donna Sunnycalb jubilantly lifts the Blue Map in celebration with her players after the Spartans beat Helena 5-0 Tuesday night in Oxford to win the Class 6A state title. The Spartans won three games out of the losers bracket. (Dennis Victory/AHSAA)
By JIMMY WIGFIELD
OXFORD — Inches away from playoff death Tuesday evening, Saraland’s softball players revived a line that had become their hosanna.
After that, defending state champion Helena didn’t have a prayer.
“The last thing we say after our prayer every day is ‘Keep swinging,’” Spartans coach Donna Sunnycalb said of the phrase taken from a book her team read entitled “The Twin Thieves,” which speaks of overcoming the fear of failure and judgment.
It was in the crucible of the Class 6A finals that Saraland kept swinging — “played free,” as Sunnycalb described it — and calmly unhitched itself from what might have otherwise been a flaming boxcar tumbling off the tracks.
First, right fielder Bryleigh Goff caught a bullet aimed at the Spartans’ forehead to save the first game, then state tournament MVP Myleigh Dobbins made the Huskies look as if they were swinging feathers, concluding a brilliant two-day pitching performance with a seven-hit shutout in the second game of a 3-1 and 5-0 sweep to win Saraland’s first softball Blue Map.
The No. 2-ranked Spartans (48-8-2) won three games out of the elimination bracket Tuesday after losing to No. 7-ranked Helena 6-3 on Monday at Choccolocco Park, the high temple of Alabama high school softball. Saraland began the day by beating No. 1-ranked Hartselle 9-2.
The Spartans captured the state championship in their eighth appearance in the tournament and after finishing as the runner-up last year.
“One of the hardest things to do is to get back to this game after being runner-up,” Sunnycalb said. “The one thing that we worried about was just not being afraid to fail and not worrying about the judgment of everybody else. We worried about just taking care of ourselves, so the kids played free.”
Dobbins, who is going to play for the University of Mobile, finished her senior year with a 17-4 record and a 1.63 ERA and delivered one of the greatest performances from the circle in state tournament history.
The right-hander won all five of Saraland’s games in the tournament, allowing only 11 runs in 39 innings. In Tuesday’s three games, she reluctantly gave up three runs, struck out 23 and walked just two in 21.2 innings.
Dobbins wasn’t overpowering in the final but was precise and in command, using her curveball and changeup to frustrating effect. In the five games, she threw strikes on 70% of her pitches (384 of 545), including 52 of 69 in the last game. In the final three games, she left the leadoff batter reach base only seven of 22 times (two of those on errors), including just once in the winner-take-all game.
“Dobbins was a dawg today,” Sunnycalb said. “She probably threw like 40 innings in two days. She’s just got some nasty pitches. She wants the ball. It’s something special when the lights come on and the sun goes down, these girls act like a different beast.”
Dobbins said she could have kept pitching.
“The adrenaline was pumping,” she said. “I think I could have gone however many more we needed. I’ve been on the team for five years and this is the moment we’ve been working for so long after getting runner-up last year. We weren’t satisfied with that. We knew we could have gotten the Blue and we came up here with that mission to get the Blue from the very beginning.”
Dobbins said Sunnycalb asked her if she wanted the ball in the final game. Her reply: “Yes, I’m gonna finish this and we’re gonna win it.”
Dobbins had hoped to celebrate the state championship by jumping into the 33-acre lake at Choccolocco Park with her teammates but it’s forbidden for anything living except bream, bass and catfish.
The Huskies went down hook, line and sinker after Goff’s legendary catch in the bottom of the seventh inning of the first game. In a 1-1 tie, Helena had two runners on base with two outs when Hayden Trawick timed Dobbins perfectly and smashed a sinking line drive to right field which seemed certain to fall and give the Huskies the Blue Map. But Goff dove head-first, extended her glove and snared the ball inches off the ground to force extra innings. Otherwise, the ball could have rolled downhill all the way back to Saraland.
Goff said she had practiced such a catch all week.
“It was coming at me and I just knew that if I didn’t catch it, that was the game,” she said. “I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got to lay it out on the line’ and God’s will, I caught it.”
Sunnycalb knew the risky play was the difference in winning the championship or another unsatisfying runner-up trophy.
“That was so huge,” she said. “We teach our players to be aggressive because we have speed in the outfield. Bryleigh did something that we do all the time. Some days she wins and some days she doesn’t. Most of the time she’s there. She came up clutch for us this time.”
Goff didn’t want to take another Red Map home.
“It’s very motivational,” she said. “It really makes you want to dig deeper than the rest of them.”
The Spartans went deep because of their quality pitching depth, as Dobbins and fellow senior Laken Bryan (18-2, 1.28 ERA) proved a formidable starting pair.
“Our pitching’s been great this year,” said Sunnycalb, whose is losing five seniors in Dobbins, Bryan, Lily Roberts, Jadyn Byrd and Mallory Brown.
She hopes to defend the state championship in 2027 with a team that has at least two years of experience in the finals.
“When we got here last year, they got super hungry,” Sunnycalb said. “They understood how special this is here. All season long, they knew what they had to do to get here. It wasn’t these days where you come to practice and you didn’t feel like doing anything. It was always let’s work harder, let’s do this, all the things that championship teams need to do.”
The softball state championship concluded a year in which Saraland also reached the state championship football game for the fourth straight season and the boys basketball team reached the state final four for the first time.
