Madison McNamee, senior pitcher for the Cabrillo High School softball team, has not one but three league titles to her name. She’s been honored with League MVP multiple times and throws a mean stinkball. Just after the Sun goes to press on June 2, her teammates and she will play for the chance to enter CIF finals.
This is the first time the Conquistador softball ladies have made it that far in CIF, she said, since 1990.
“Our defense has been stellar,” she said. “I couldn’t have done anything I did this season without them. Our hitting has been amazing as well.”
The spirit the Cabrillo players share is key: “We’re always picking each other up and encouraging each other,” she said, “and everyone gets along really well. It shows in the energy that we bring to every game.”
McNamee rose up through Cabrillo’s softball program like a rocket. Her sophomore year was her “development year,” with her coach, Adrian Abayari, getting her up on the mound as often as he could, which according him was “as many innings as possible, as many games as possible.” Over the course of that season McNamee pitched so well, she led Cabrillo to a league championship.
That first championship was a sign of things to come. McNamee kept at the batting cages and the pitcher’s mound over the summer. She played club ball to keep her skills up. In the fall of her sophomore year, she returned to the Conquistadors with a crop of talented freshmen defenders.
“That was a very talented team she was on,” Abayari said. “Her junior year was a very dominant year.”
Cabrillo figured it had the talent to take the CIF championship. They swept the league. McNamee picked up the honor of MVP, but the team “just couldn’t get over that hump,” according to Abayari, and the goal of winning CIF was put off another year.
At the beginning of her senior season, McNamee picked up a back injury and was out for about a month. Still, she came back and led her team to a 14-0 league shutout and the third league championship in a row for the Conquistadores. Now, she’s closer than ever to that CIF dream.
Abayari expects that McNamee can handle the pressure. “She really doesn’t get flustered, frustrated,” he said. “Sometimes she makes a mistake and has to trust her defense to play for her. She’ll give me a look, and it’s like, ‘I’m OK.’ She’s in control of what’s going on. Her stature out there speaks volumes.”
This article appears in Jun 4-11, 2015.