Hagerty wins first state softball title since 2018
Campbell Downing’s two-out double and Bella Ortiz’s shutdown run turned Hagerty’s runner-up pain into the school’s first state softball crown.
Hagerty’s redemption season ended with one swing and a shutout.
Sophomore catcher Campbell Downing ripped a two-out, two-run double to left field in the bottom of the sixth inning, and the Huskies held on for a 2-0 victory over Western High School to capture the Class 7A state softball championship at Boombah-Soldiers Creek Park in Longwood. Hagerty finished 27-4 and won the program’s first-ever state softball title, a breakthrough that carried extra weight after last season’s runner-up finish.
The decisive hit came in a game where offense was scarce and every mistake mattered. Hagerty managed only four hits, but Downing delivered the one that changed the title game, driving in both runs in front of a home-area crowd at the Seminole County complex that hosted the state tournament for the second straight year. Western, a Broward County program that had met Hagerty in last year’s semifinal, again found itself on the wrong side of a Husky breakthrough.
Freshman pitcher Bella Ortiz gave Hagerty the kind of late-season stability championship teams need. Ortiz, from Oviedo, worked through the postseason with poise beyond her age, and her profile had already marked her as one of the area’s rising stars. She was 14, could throw 67 mph, and had spent the summer with Team Puerto Rico at the Softball World Cup in Italy, where she helped win a silver medal. That experience showed in the pressure moments of the state run.
Coach Tom Kreahling called the matchup a true execution game, and the Huskies lived that out by making the few chances they had count. Ortiz said the pressure had lifted because she could trust her team, while Downing said the moment still did not feel real yet. Shortstop Mattingly Klein echoed the emotional release of the final out, calling the championship moment “surreal and insane.”
The title also resonated beyond one team’s trophy case. Hagerty and Western had already built a postseason history, with Hagerty beating Western 4-3 in last season’s semifinal before the rematch in Longwood. Now the Huskies return to Seminole County with a championship that resets the program’s standard and gives Hagerty a new marker in school history: not a near miss, but a state title.
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