NANKIN – It’s been two decades since the Mapleton softball program finished all alone at the top of the Firelands Conference.
Currently 7-0 in league play, the Mounties are halfway to finally doing it again.
Second-year head coach Mike Leibolt and his MHS squad were hoping to take a stranglehold on the FC’s No. 1 spot Thursday at Crestview. But a pop-up storm postponed their showdown against the Cougars (6-5, 5-1 FC), who they topped a week earlier, 5-3.
Rain seems to be the only thing slowing down the Mounties during a spring that is blooming into one of the best in program history.
At 14-0 overall, Mapleton was ranked third in Division VI in the most recent Ohio High School Softball Coaches State Poll.
The Mounties are ranked No. 6 on MaxPreps, which has them listed as the last undefeated Division VI squad in all of Ohio.
“I knew on paper we should be good, but until you see it, you never know,” said Leibolt, a 2000 MHS graduate. “Our offense has been hitting, our defense has been solid and our pitching has been great. I can’t take anything away from any aspect of the game so far.”
Led by senior right-handed pitchers Kelsi Clark (8-0, 2.10 ERA in 49.1 innings) and Audrey Hellickson (5-0, 0.52 ERA in 26.2), Mapleton has posted five shutouts and has allowed more than three runs in a game just twice.
Offensively, the team has been a juggernaut, outscoring opponents 168-30 (12.0 runs per game) while putting together a .456 batting average as a squad.
Unbelievably, the Mounties have just 28 strikeouts in 463 plate appearances.
“There’s some decent speed on the team, but we’ve got a lot of good hitters,” Leibolt said. “We hit 1-through-13, because even the girls on our bench can hit.”
Sophomore Addison Hess has been a bulldozer in the batter’s box. The cleanup hitter has an otherworldly .756 batting average (31-for-41) while collecting nearly as many extra-base hits (14) as she has singles (17).
She’s got all three of the team’s home runs and leads Mapleton in RBIs (32), runs (28) and walks (9), while adding 10 steals.
“She has patience up there, looks for her pitch and she’s always calm,” Leibolt said.
Seniors Hellickson (.659, 9 doubles, 25 runs), Payten Frye (.571, 24 RBIs) and Mattie Bates (.500, 25 runs, 20 steals) all are getting hits half the time they step into the box as well.
Hess and Hellickson both are coming off All-Ohio performances on the basketball court during the winter season. And if the softball team’s hot-out-of-the-gate start sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
A good bit of Mapleton’s roster was on the basketball team that opened its winter season just a few months ago with a 9-1 record before reaching its first district final since 2015.
That Mountie squad ended up with a 19-6 record overall and nearly played into March, leaving Leibolt with little time to fine-tune a lot of his softball team’s talents.
It has not seemed to matter.
“By the time they came into softball, we were ready to start scrimmages because of the great run they had (in basketball),” Leibolt said.
“We hit daily, so it’s one thing we work on a lot. Our bats never really worried me, it was just – going into the season without getting to see our team chemistry on defense – that’s where I didn’t know how we were going to be.”
Perhaps MHS was drawing from some of its recent experience on the softball diamond as well. Just two years ago – when Leibolt was in his fifth season as an assistant under then-head coach Dan Sanders – the Mounties stormed out to a 12-1 start.
Like this spring’s edition, that MHS squad had a big senior class and had lost just one player from a season earlier.
Hellickson and Clark were both sophomore pitchers then, as Mapleton was led by ace Emilee Dennison, now one of Leibolt’s assistants alongside Travis Frye, Fred Lowery and Mike Clark.
Those 2024 Mounties won their first eight games, finished 21-5 overall and split an FC crown with eventual state finalist Monroeville.
Now also featuring freshman Aubree Hess (.415, 16 RBIs, 14 runs) and additional seniors Kendall Ramey (.434, 19 runs), Jaiden Simonson (14 RBIs, 10 runs) and Ava Clay (.303, 5 doubles), Mapleton is steering toward another big finish.
The Mounties picked up solid nonconference wins over Ashland, Loudonville and Colonel Crawford, and they will face stiff tests in this weekend’s Prebis Memorial Classic vs. Division III teams Rocky River (10-5) and Midview (11-5).
But Leibolt said if his team wants to make some program history, it will need to have a game-by-game focus.
“I have not looked back through the history and talked about when the last time was we won (the FC) outright (2006),” Leibolt said. “The only thing we talked about at the beginning of the season was our goals, and winning the conference was one of them.”
“With a 14-0 start, you have a target on your back, so everyone’s after you and you could lose any day of the week,” he added. “But the amount of work and effort these girls put in, they want to get better every day. They just battle.”
