By Mike Whaley / mwhaley@seacoastonline.com
Editor’s Note: This is the third in an ongoing series on significant local sporting moments and events from the past decade.
DOVER -- Five years later, it still gives Teagan Bostrom goosebumps.
Then a Dover High School junior, Bostrom found herself at the plate with one out and a runner on second base in the top of the 12th inning of a 2-2 tie with Salem in the 2015 NHIAA Division I softball championship at Southern New Hampshire University.
High school sporting moments don’t come much bigger.
“No one was expecting a whole lot, obviously,” said Bostrom, the No. 9 hitter, a late-season addition to the starting lineup in left field. “Most people thought it would be a quick 1-2-3 inning. It wasn’t. It was something I will never forget.”
Instead, Bostrom drilled an RBI double off the third-base bag to put the Green Wave ahead, 3-2. They scored two more runs to go up 5-2.
“I knew I had to make contact,” recalled Bostrom, a recent graduate of the University of Rhode Island, now working at Concord Hospital as a medical technologist where she is involved in all the COVID-19 testing. “It didn’t matter how I did it. My team needed something. I choked up a little bit. It was a quicker pitcher than we’ve seen. Just make contact. That was something that everyone has always said to me since T-Ball. If you can make contact, that’s 75 percent of the battle. In my head I said, ‘I’m going to make contact. I’m not going to strike out.’ It was all a whirlwind, from the moment I made contact until I stood on second base.”
Bostrom’s double scored Jessie Mau from second base. Caroline Schoenbucher was hit by a pitch. After a wild pitch pushed runners to third and second, winning pitcher Molly St. Germain belted a two-run double to left to give Dover a 5-2 cushion.
Salem went 1-2-3 in the bottom of the inning. No. 4 Dover (18-4) had successfully completed the difficult task of repeating as Division I state softball champs.
Dover had ended its two-year playoff run pretty much as it started — winning in extra innings.
The Salem game had several memorable moments. One came in the fourth inning when right fielder Hannah Quitugua made a spectacular running catch to snuff a Salem rally. The Blue Devils had already scored twice to go up 2-1. If Quitugua didn’t make the catch, at least one more run would have scored — maybe more.
“It didn’t really show up in the book,” said coach Tim Dudley, who guided the Green Wave from 2010 to 2015 and 2019. “It wasn’t a hit, a home run. It was just a catch. But it changed the game.”
Maybe saved it.
More importantly, at the time, it kept the Salem lead to one run, which Dover extinguished in the fifth when Schoenbucher hit a solo homer to left to knot the score at 2-all.
“That goes down as one of my memorable moments,” said Schoenbucher, now living in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., where she works in a chiropractor’s office during the week and helps to run United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA) softball tournaments on the weekends.
St. Germain remembers coming into the dugout in the 10th inning. She was bone tired. “I was talking to (assistant coach) Dave McCann. ‘I don’t think I have anything left. I don’t know (if I can continue). I’m pretty tired right now,’” St. Germain recalls.
McCann’s approach with St. Germain was to get under her skin a little, get her angry.
“He told me I was being a big baby and that I had a whole other game left in me,” said St. Germain, a graduate of Keene State with a major in sociology. “He was right. I had to go out there.”
St. Germain got fired up. When she came in for the 12th inning, she said, “We’ve got to win this game. I’m not pitching all these innings not to win.”
It was her eighth consecutive playoff victory. She allowed two runs on 10 hits, whiffed four and walked one.
Even more satisfying was that Dover had avenged an ugly 8-0 loss to Salem to end the regular season at home during its senior day two weeks earlier.
Unlike 2014, the early rounds of the 2015 tournament were relatively drama-free for the Green Wave.
In the first round they blasted No. 13 Bedford, 13-1, behind St. Germain’s two-hitter. Schoenbucher went 4 for 4 with two doubles and four RBIs. First baseman Emily Schlapak swatted her ninth homer of the season.
In the quarterfinals against No. 5 Alvirne, St. Germain whiffed 12 in a 7-2 victory. Ashley Deyo and Aly Wilson each had two RBIs.
St. Germain was again the story in the semis against No. 8 Concord. She struck out eight and went 3 for 3 with three RBIs as Dover rolled to a 7-1 victory. Schoenbucher, who batted .733 during the tournament, went 3 for 3 with four runs scored.
The ride to the 2015 title was certainly an easier road even with the Salem game thrown into the mix.
In 2014, the Green Wave (17-5 overall) were fortunate they weren’t knocked out in either of the first two rounds, a pair of dramatic come-from-behind wins in extra innings.
In their opener as the No. 3 seed against No. 14 Winnacunnet, Dover trailed 8-4 in the fourth inning in a game they rallied five separate times to get it tied. They won in the bottom of the 10th when Schlapak, who had five hits, singled through the shortstop hole to score St. Germain with the winning run. It was their only lead of the game.
St. Germain added four hits, while Deyo hit two home runs. It was an ugly game. The two teams combined for 30 hits and 10 errors.
It was deja vu against No. 11 Merrimack, a game Dover won in the ninth inning on Kristin Boduch’s walk-off RBI single.
Schlapak kept the season alive with a home run in the bottom of the seventh to force extra innings. Dover committed seven errors and left 13 runners on base, but somehow had found a way to win.
“Those two games we really struggled,” said Schoenbucher, who recalled being in the dugout during the Winnacunnet game with Boduch, the team’s only senior starter. “I remember not wanting to give up. We wanted to keep fighting. I knew it was hard for Kristin. If we had lost that game that would have been her last game.”
The semis and finals, in comparison, were cakewalks.
A five-run fourth inning was the difference in the semis at SNHU against No. 2 Salem, a 5-1 win. St. Germain was the hero, holding the Blue Devils to one run on nine hits with three whiffs. At the plate, she hit a three-run triple during the fourth that helped to break open the game.
The championship, their first appearance since 2009, was against rival Spaulding, the No. 1 seed, and ace pitcher, Sami West, the D-I Pitcher of the Year. West had whiffed 16 Green Wave batters on May 8 in a 6-2 Spaulding win.
“She had a lethal rise ball,” recalled St. Germain.
Indeed, West did, a pitch that rose out of the strike zone as it approached the plate. It was hard to lay off that pitch as Dover learned in its 6-2 loss.
Dudley had a plan. “We spent two straight days at practice learning not to swing at that pitch,” he said. “She never threw it for a strike. Eventually she is going to have to come in and you’re going to get a chance.”
It paid off. Dover scored twice in the top of the first on a two-out error to take the lead for good. Schlapak’s two-run double in the third made it 4-0. A Schoenbucher three-run triple in the fourth widened the gap to 7-1.
Spaulding sparked late, but it wasn’t enough, as Dover went on to win, 8-4, the school’s first state softball championship.
Schlapak, Schoenbucher and St. Germain accounted for eight of the Green Wave’s 10 hits, while scoring six runs and knocking in another six.
Those three went on to play in college — Schlapak at Wheaton College, Schoenbucher at the University of New England, and St. Germain at Keene State, where Boduch was also a teammate. Deyo played at the next level at Franklin Pierce and Plymouth State.
“When you play a season, only one team comes out with a win,” said Schoenbucher, who played third base and shortstop for Dover. “To be able to do that two times in a row, that was huge. It was a great way to end my high school experience and career with some of the best girls I ever could have met.”
The die was cast in 2013. With a nucleus of sophomores, Dover lost in the semis that year to eventual champion Timberlane, 4-1. “We got overwhelmed by the facilities at SNHU,” coach Dudley said. “The big arena, lots of people. I think they were a little bit in awe. They let that affect the way they played.
“To be honest,” added Dudley, “we were a lot of individuals on that team and really couldn’t pull it together. It wasn’t the proper leadership. We learned and came back and made it right.”
Twice.
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