Cornerstone Charter lets lead slip away in FHSAA 2A softball state final
Cornerstone Charter’s eighth grade pitching ace, Izzy Choquette, had high-powered Oxbridge Academy of West Palm Beach baffled for the first five innings in Thursday night’s FHSAA Class 1A softball state championship game. After walking the first batter up, she sat down 15 in a row and had her team in control with a no-hitter possible. But the Ducks’ paid a big price for their inability to come up with clutch hits to enlarge a thin 1-0 lead.
Without any margin for error the Ducks made two dream-crushing throwing errors in the seventh inning and lost 5-1 in a game played at the Boombah-Soldiers Creek Park complex in Longwood. The start of the game was delayed by just over an hour due to lightning in the vicinity. That didn’t chase away a big crowd of Cornerstone fans who almost completely filled the home team side of the championship stadium in the six-field complex.
“We just kept letting them hang around and that cost us,” Cornerstone head coach Dan Lobozzo said afterward. “Oxbridge earned it. They played till the end.
” Cornerstone finished 23-6 and is due to bring back seven of Thursday’s 10 starters. The Ducks lineup had two eighth graders, one freshman, three sophomores, one junior and three seniors. Oxbridge (24-3), which came in with a .
433 team batting average, managed only three hits in 6⅓ innings against Choquette and five for the game. She struck out eight. Emma Pynes, a junior slugger who batted .