Taylor Apple homered and struck out 14 batters as Western Alamance advanced to the 3A softball state championship series for the first time in school history. The Warriors defeated South Johnston 2-0 to sweep the regional finals on Thursday May 25, 2023.
Taylor, you’re going to play for a three, a state championship, but just hearing that what goes through your mind, it’s unbelievable. It’s something I’ve always dreamed of and now we’re here to do it with these girls. How special is that? You’ve gotten to the place where this has just been your goal for four years. It’s very special. I’ve played with them since I was like seven. It’s our last, well, I guess this will be our last two or three games. So it’s very special and it will be even more special if we go out on time. You hit the big home run there. That kind of, you know, they had made a couple of threats with a few girls on base, but it felt like your home run there to go up. Two, nothing kind of just solidified everything. Talk through that home run there. Well, I’ve been in my head, I haven’t been doing his good lately, obviously, but whenever I got the first hit tonight, I was like, ok, relax and then I went up there and I was like, we got to get on the board again and had a good kind of laid back a little bit after that 14 strikeouts for you tonight, but it felt like what really stood out was the defense behind you. Gilli makes that incredible diving catch there early. Uh mckenna has the kind of collision in the outfield, makes the great diving catch saved a run there. It seemed like what can you say about the defense behind you? I couldn’t do it without them. They’re amazing. They’ve really stepped up these past couple of games and so is the offense we’ve all been doing really good and they have done amazing. You’re two games away from ending your high school career as a state champion. What’s it going to take from you and your teammates to be able to get to that point? We definitely need to start, keep scoring early and getting on top early and we need to keep the ball in play and we need to do really good defense, which I mean, we’re doing good at now, so we need to keep everything perfect. So, congratulations. You’re off to the state championship. Best of luck. Thank you.
