Softball teams are ripe with tradition, but the Los Alamitos Griffins have one of the truly strangest you’ll see: at any sign of a good play, girls on the bench will pick up industrial-strength bubble machines and fire away in no particular direction. It started with a simple, innocent screenshot from pitcher Berkeley Vance sent to the team group chat of said bubble gun for sale on Amazon; in the two weeks since the Griffin’s first purchase, the bubbles are constant, stragglers of air foam floating over the diamond at any given moment.
“I didn’t think we were actually going to [buy] it,” said senior catcher Taryn Clements. “And then the next week, we had another.”
And bubbles were shot most emphatically, across a two-day schedule Friday and Saturday in the area mainstay Michelle Carew Classic tournament, for Clements. On Friday, she was the catalyst in a quarterfinal win over Orange Lutheran, bombing a grand slam. And on Saturday night against Saint Francis (Mountain View), she put the cherry on top of an all-tournament performance with a fourth-inning homer deep to left, the eventual winning run in a 4-2 victory.
As she crossed third after the solo shot, her teammates gathered at home plate, bubble guns primed and firing to the heavens.
“I could see it,” Clements said of the bubbles, “before I could see anyone else.”
It was a dominant tournament for Los Alamitos, which staked its claim as the best team in the state with a run through some of the Southland’s best. First came a win over surprising Mission Viejo — which upset Norco — then Orange Lutheran, and finally dispatching Huntington Beach in the semifinal.
On Saturday, the Griffins had their hands full with Saint Francis, which pulled even with Los Alamitos 2-2 through three innings in a grind-it-out game full of fielder’s choices and base-hit-less runs batted in. In the top of the fourth, though, Clements broke the tie with the solo shot.
“The moment it came off the bat,” she said, “I just knew.”
Saint Francis threatened in the bottom of the fifth, hitting a double to put runners on second and third with two outs. But tournament MVP Vance whiffed the next batter, hopping out of the circle with a yell and a fist-pump. A seventh-inning full-extension diving grab of a liner by second baseman Bella Rodriguez added a highlight-reel play to the tournament win.
After rain in Southern California wiped out a planned four-day schedule, games were hastily reshuffled to Friday and Saturday. A beautiful blue sky proved the perfect end to tournament director and former Canyon High coach Lance Eddy’s 36-year run helming the Michelle Carew Classic, renamed after the death of former Canyon star Michelle Carew.
Huntington Beach finished third, led by a 17-strikeout performance by All-Tournament selection Zoe Prystajko in a win over Norco. Marina High ranked fourth, and Great Oak fifth.