Big Park softball wins 16-2 under Shara Coughlin3 min read

Zack Garcia/Larson Newspapers
Pitcher Morgan Fritz winds up for the Big Park Community School softball team, with fellow eighth-grader Grace Hafner backing her up at first base. The Coyotes fell to 2-2 in the Verde Valley Conference with their March 8 loss at Camp Verde Middle School.

With a final softball season in doubt, Big Park Community School parent Shara Coughlin took up the reins of the program and led the Coyotes to a 16-2 win in four innings March 1 at West Sedona School.


“I’ve coached a state champion before on the East Coast; it was just not in softball,” said Coughlin, who, along with assistants Jeff Fritz and Randy Hafner, has led a team of all but two eighth-graders to a 2-2 record. “With all the unrest and the drama at the school, I think softball was going to kind of fall through the cracks a little bit.

“I didn’t want there to not be a season for the eighth-graders. I couldn’t sit by and let that happen.”

So a month ago, a week before the start of the season, Coughlin tried her hand at softball for the first time, assembling a lineup of 14 girls, some of whom are also in their first year playing the sport, including right fielders

Nana Sato and Anna Shimkus.

“We’re trying to give Anna a chance to build her confidence,” Coughlin said of the only sixth-grader on her 10-player roster. “Nana, she’s older, more experienced, but it’s her first year in softball.”

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Fellow eighth-grader Montserrah Arizmendi controls the outfield defense in center field, with the team’s only seventh-grader, Tashanae Kristofors, assigned by Coughlin to left.

“In junior high, I need a girl that can catch, throw and run out there, even if she doesn’t want to,” which describes Arizmendi, the team’s “reluctant center fielder,” Coughlin said.

Grace Hafner, a two-year starter at first base, and Ariana Landeverde at third, another first-year player with “amazing athletic ability,” Karissa Ramirez, has been holding down second.

“A lot of teams have one or two standout players carrying the whole team,” Coughlin said.

One of the three experienced Coyotes leaders has been shortstop Natalie Montgomery, who has mopped up in relief of starter Morgan Fritz.

However, in her first start, she allowed just two runs the whole way for a “pretty substantial, decisive” win, Coughlin added.

“We’ve been scoring four runs or more in every game,” said West Sedona head coach Barbra Robles, whose 14 Wildcats are still in search of their first win.

Eighth-grader Diana Zaun heads a larger Wildcats pitching staff that throws to seventh-grader Audrey Veliz.

Eighth-graders Amari Sonn, shortstop Odalis Robles and Tiffani Arenas, who also plays first base, aren’t quite yet at the level of Montgomery or Fritz, a club softball player from Iowa, who throw to team captain and three-year veteran Maricela Quidera.

Aria Harness switches off with Zaun at second base, with fellow eighth-graders Soraya Movassaghi and Christina Schweiss sharing third base.

Seventh-graders Alexis Boswell and Leslie Suarez guarded the lines in left and right field, respectively, with Ashley Meekma and Harmony and MacKenzie Stafford rotating in center as the Wildcats lost, 15-9, to the Coyotes’ other victim, Pine Strawberry Elementary School.

George Werner

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