Enfield
In softball, that feeling has been amplified. Mascoma is on its fourth coach in four years and is playing its games 10 minutes down the road at Shaker Recreation Field for the second stright year as Mascoma’s softball field gets torn up during the high school’s renovation.
Consistency, at least recently, has never been an option. Many of Mascoma’s athletes have gotten used to the revolving door of leadership. And each time, they said, coaches have never stayed long enough to establish a culture for a program that, the Royals admit, desperately needs a facelift.
Billy O’Connell, they hope, is different. Consistency was part of the reason Mascoma athletic director John Kelly chose O’Connell — one of only two candidates who applied for the job — in the first place. He volunteers with Mascoma’s football and boys basketball teams, has coached junior varsity baseball for the past several years and is a familiar face around the student body.
He is also a former high school baseball player, growing up in Massachusetts. His experience was enough to convince Mascoma officials that he was the right guy for the job.
“It was a no-brainer,” said Kelly, who stopped by practice on Thursday to help with drills.
Initially, O’Connell wasn’t even interested in the job. But the position was still open as late as February and, after talking it over with school officials, he changed his mind.
“Our school is so small that our basketball team is our softball team, our softball team is our field hockey team. They just go from season to season to season,” he said. “(Mascoma girls basketball coach John Billings) said that there was a good group of veterans and a real good group of freshmen. I thought, ‘I could do that.’ ”
The Royals are coming off another disappointing season, finishing the 2015 campaign at 2-14 and missing the NHIAA Division III playoffs.
O’Connell’s first game at the helm didn’t lack for road bumps, as the absence of outdoor practices led to a 13-1 loss to Inter-Lakes on Wednesday.
Starting pitcher Mikayla Clifford, catcher Raeleigh Mansur and shortstop Kahn are the team’s only locks in the starting lineup; the rest are still up in the air. Still, it’s a story that has gotten all too familiar: bad season, new coach, wash-rinse-repeat.
“It’s hard because we get taught different things,” Kahn said. “But it gets better every year because we kind of see other people’s viewpoints. We take different words from different coaches and kind of put them together.”
For Clifford, the inconsistency all started to blend together.
“It’s hard because every coach has a different teaching style,” she said. “It’s been different every year.”
O’Connell tried to quell that notion early on, leading a winter meeting with his athletes to go over his expectations. On Thursday, O’Connell gathered his group before practice to talk about what went wrong the previous game about, taking suggestions on what they could work on and how to do it.
But what the Royals want is proof that things are changing, that the team is making progress, that this year is different. It’s sometimes hard to judge, especially so early on in a season.
But for Mascoma’s seniors, it’s the one thing that has kept their program from moving forward, creating a reputation of losing among Mascoma’s student body that kept potential athletes from coming out for softball.
O’Connell wants to change that. He wants to change a lot of things to recreate stability.
Of the 21 girls that came out for softball this season, Mascoma cut eight to create a varsity roster of 13.
O’Connell also has named no captains by design, saying he wants 13 leaders on his team, 13 captains.
It’s all part of creating what he calls a “sisterhood” within Mascoma softball, a cohesiveness that’s been missing since the Royals can remember.
“It’s fair,” Kahn said. “It only makes it better for the team. Everyone has a position, everyone has a spot and everyone has their own job to do. It’s not two people guiding the team. We’re all guiding each other.”
Kelly said the school would have put together a junior varsity team this season with its remaining athletes, but couldn’t find a jayvee coach in time. Finding a varsity coach was hard enough.
For now, O’Connell wants to focus on the basics, admitting he threw too much at his team too early in the season. Rookie mistake. But it’s a mistake O’Connell will gladly make as he adjusts to his new role. His team is adjusting with him, all on the fly.
“The best thing about this year was everybody knew what the plan was for this year and how things were going to go,” Clifford said. “Everyone was on the same page. The parents, the players — everyone got a baseline.”
Josh Weinreb can be reached at jweinreb@vnews.com or at 603-727-3306.