Destiny Christian’s home run girls for its win over Whitney of Rocklin on Saturday in the CIF NorCal D1 title game were Ayla Tuua, Ella Dossey and Roxanne Sardo. Photo: Mark Tennis.
A three-run homer and a two-run homer within a few swings of one half-inning gives Destiny Christian of Sacramento all it needed in a 6-3 win over Whitney of Rocklin in Saturday’s CIF NorCal D1 softball championship. The Lions completed one of the most historically significant seasons in state history at 31-0 and are expected to be named State Team of the Year early in the upcoming week.
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After LSU-bound superstar Ayla Tuua rocketed a home run deep over the centerfield fence in the first inning of Saturday’s CIF NorCal D1 championship game between her team from Destiny Christian of Sacramento and Whitney of Rocklin, it was clear that she likely wasn’t going to get much else to hit for the rest of the afternoon. The thinking was that others hitting behind her in the Lions’ lineup would have to come up with some big hits.
Tuua’s first inning homer didn’t give the host Lions a lead. In fact, they were behind 2-1 and it stayed that way until the bottom of the fifth inning when two of the others hitting behind Tuua came through. And those two players, Ella Dossey and Roxanne Sardo, carried Tuua and her squad to a 6-3 win over a Whitney team that had to play an extra-inning game just the day before three hours away in Clovis.
Winning the CIF NorCal D1 title was a big goal for the Destiny Christian team since the beginning of the season with the knowledge that despite being a D3 team from the CIF Sac-Joaquin Section that competitive equity seeding would make it possible to be moved up to the top division of the regional playoffs. Finishing with a perfect record at 31-0, however, is something that can’t be planned.
Destiny Christian head coach Shannon Tuua and the team’s other primary coach, Lance Woodcock, hold the CIF NorCal D1 title plaque after win in final game. Photo: Mark Tennis.
The win over Whitney will push the 31-0 record for head coach Shannon Tuua’s squad to No. 4 on the all-time state list for best record in a season. We saw one of those teams end its season that had a 32-0 record, Archbishop Mitty of San Jose, in 2009. That same year, Sutter, a small school in the CIF Northern Section, went 34-0. The only other one at 32-0 has been Ocean View of Huntington Beach in 1985.
It’s also impossible for the Lions to plan out how all the various state and national rankings are going to fall into place. Even at 31-0 and with a CIF NorCal D1 title, there would have been other teams from Southern California (who all play each other a lot more often than top teams do in the north) that likely would be ranked higher at the end of the season. But neither Norco or Murrieta Mesa of Murrieta was able to win the CIF Southern Section title. That pushed Destiny Christian to the top of the Cal-Hi Sports state rankings (the ones done 10 times longer than any others) and the team will be expected to stay there when all of the final rankings and the State Team of the Year announcement is made in a couple of days.
“I’m a little overwhelmed and very grateful,” Shannon Tuua said after the team collected all of its medals and CIF title plaque. “Just very proud of everyone. We were behind in both of our last two games but never doubted we’d come back.”
Her daughter described what it felt like after the final out was recorded.
“Amazing, top of the world,” she said. “When I saw it was the third strike, I just wanted to run to my catcher. It was time to celebrate with my teammates and my sisters. I’m just happy to be part of history to have laid the foundation for the future of this program.”
Two days after the Lions fell behind 1-0 in the top of the first inning to St. Francis of Mountain View in its NorCal semifinal game, they fell behind 2-0 in the first inning of Saturday’s final.
Whitney, which won SJS D1 title and had only lost in one other game this season in which sophomore Taylor Cordell had pitched a complete game, grabbed its 2-0 lead on a two-run homer by another sophomore, Kaitlyn Johnson, who came up with the big hit after teammate Bri Steffens had been hit by a pitch.
Tuua, who went all seven innings in the circle of Destiny’s 4-3 win over St. Francis on Thursday, didn’t start in the title game. Sardo, the team’s No. 2 who had six shutout innings against St. Francis in a game played in March, took the start vs Whitney and gave up the two-run shot. Tuua replaced her in the top of the second inning with one out and two runners on base, then struck out the next two batters to end that threat.
Earlier in the bottom of the first, Tuua also made it a 2-1 game by crushing a pitch from Cordell well over the centerfield fence for her 19th homer of the season. Last year’s Cal-Hi Sports State Junior Player of the Year also was named as the Gatorade State Player of the Year on Friday for the second time. Our own state player honors are still to come.
Cordell only gave up one hit in the second, third and fourth innings and the Wildcats also put pressure on Tuua and had a chance to add on to their lead. Mia Jimenez had a running catch in left that saved two runs from scoring in the third inning but in the top of the fifth she couldn’t come up with a catch near the fence on a ball hit by Whitney’s Rebecca Rau. She ended up on third base with one out, but didn’t score as she was thrown out at the plate. After an infield hit put runners at first and third with two outs, Tuua then got another strikeout to end the threat.
The bottom of the fifth began for the Lions with leadoff hitter K.K. Fulmer knocking a single to right field. Even though it was certain that bunting over Fulmer to second would just mean that Tuua would be intentionally walked after that, that’s what the Destiny Christian coaches (including highly vocal leader Lance Woodcock) decided to do with Maddy Woodcock. The next batter, Dossey, has been as hot a batter as Tuua in recent games and showed that giving her the opportunity to swing with two runners on was the right move. Cordell made good pitches that were fouled off but Dossey finally got one a little too much over the plate and hit a drive over the left field fence for a three-run homer. Just like that the 2-1 lead for Whitney turned into a 4-2 deficit.
Whitney’s Kaitlyn Johnson, who had a two-run homer in the first inning, led the handshake line for her team after the end of Saturday’s CIF NorCal D1 championship. Photo: Mark Tennis / Cal-Hi Sports.
The Lions weren’t done in the inning, either. Just after Dossey’s homer, sophomore Takiyah Haygood (who had three RBI and three hits in the win vs St. Francis) smacked a double. Sardo was up next and the Purdue commit quickly got into one and hit a two-run homer. At that point, Destiny Christian had a 6-2 lead and with Tuua pitching it wasn’t quite like victory formation in football but close.
Whitney didn’t threaten in the top of the sixth, but in the top of the seventh a walk and a grounder put a runner in scoring position. Steffens then had an RBI single to make it 6-3. Johnson was up next and had a liner to right field that just went foul by about two feet. If that had been fair, it would have scored a run and the tying run would have come to the plate. Instead, Tuua completed the win by striking out Johnson for the third out.
“Dossey missed a big part of our season before she became eligible,” Shannon Tuua said. “For her to to be the one to get that homer just solidified her role as being a great player for this team. And then Roxanne came up and just did her thing.”
Whitney head coach April Steele said her players had a chip on their shoulders all week and was proud of how hard they battled.
“I think we were disrespected by where we were placed (in the seedings),” she said. “We had to travel 700 miles this week and we ended up only losing to the top seed.”
That first trip came on Tuesday as a No. 6 seed where the Wildcats took out No. 3 Archbishop Mitty of San Jose. The Wildcats then had to go all the way down to Clovis East (which definitely shouldn’t have been seeded second) for the semifinals and for a game that was switched from Thursday to Friday since graduation for the Rocklin school was on Thursday. They won, 4-1, in extra innings.
“We made improvements throughout the season and we’re happy about the future,” Steele said. “We have five starting sophomores and we have some others coming up.”
We’ll have more about the Destiny Christian historical achievements and more about Ayla Tuua in future articles. It shouldn’t take a genius to figure out what those articles are going to be about.
Mark Tennis is the co-founder and publisher of CalHiSports.com. He can be reached at markjtennis@gmail.com. Don’t forget to follow Mark on the Cal-Hi Sports Twitter handle: @CalHiSports
