They have become a beacon of stability in the Berks Conference softball landscape.
Its resume, spectacular. But for Brandywine Heights, its ubiquitous influence felt by Berks County hadn’t always been .. at least not when head coach Don Roach took the helm 16 seasons ago.
“I promised myself a long time ago that our program would be second to no one and we took steps in that direction,” Roach said after his team’s victory over fellow Berks-power Daniel Boone this past week. “We started to ask more of the kids and as that grew, the kids started to believe in the program more and more and the culture started to build that way.
“It was baby steps,” he continued. “I’d tell my players ‘this is what’s expected of us, this is what we want to do, and if we’re going to do this we need to buy into this. Once you buy into it, I guarantee you that we’ll be successful, but you have to buy into it. So let’s come along for the ride and see what happens.'”
The result speaks volumes. The Bullets have won seven District 3-AA championships since 2005 (2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005), have posted a 214-26 record the past ten seasons and have capped all of that with a PIAA-AA Championship in 2013.
Talk about success. “A culture has developed where the community, families, they’re involved with softball,” Roach said. “They enjoy it, they’re serious about it and they like the game. That’s a very neat thing to see because the culture wasn’t there in the beginning. Things we believe in, things we expect to happen, how we carry ourselves, what we want to do on the field, those are cultural things and the kids are buying into that.”
That was evident Tuesday afternoon in the Bullets’ annual litmus test against another Berks powerhouse in Daniel Boone. Taylor Sweigert, who hit the eventual game-winning home run in the team’s Berks County Championship victory over the Blazers two seasons ago, was at it again, going 4-for-4 from the plate with a triple and a double in the team’s 11-5 victory.
The game had a different feel without the Blazers’ usual dominant pitching the last five years after the graduation of Katie Erb (West Chester University) and most recently, Bekah Slattery (Lock Haven University). Still, the old guard provided a strong hint that those two teams would be in the running for the Berks Conference championship at year’s end.
“We’ve gone back for years and years, playing in county championships, regular season games and it’s always competitive,” Roach said. “It’s fun to play Boone because they’re always competitive, their girls show up ready to play.”
Sweigert along with fellow captains Savanna Ruppert (who got the win in the circle), Lauren Olsen and Hannah Leibensperger, passed their first test and are poised to pass many more this season.
For at Brandywine Heights, it’s what they do.
