Peterson Sabers succumb to Lee Council in season opener Published June 2, 2008 By Walt Johnson CSMNG PETERSON AFB, Colo. -- The Peterson Sabers women's varsity softball team dropped a 15-4 decision May 28 as it got its regular season underway in the Colorado Springs Women's Recreation Gold league. The Sabers could not have drawn a tougher opponent, Lee Council, to begin the season against. Council is one of the veteran teams in the league and has been highly successful over the past three years. One of Peterson coach Angela Young's goals for this season is to get her Lady Sabers to play with the seasoning and cohesiveness that Lee Council played with May 28. The obvious reason for that goal is how well Council played against the Lady Sabers. Council saw the Lady Sabers jump out to a 1-0 lead after the top of the first inning but there was no panic coming from the dugout or the players on the field. As Council came to bat in its half of the inning the team placed the ball in key areas to get hits and took advantage of some shaky Lady Sabers defense to come out of the inning with an 11-1 lead. Young said watching the Council team play with poise and cohesion is one of the things she is going to build on her team. While the team has the talent to play well as individuals and many of the players have had individual success in the sport, Young said she wants to see the talent come together as a team before the year is over so individual talent can play well as a team. "The thing I am going to be looking for is how well this team can come together over the course of the year and the team cohesion we can develop. The other thing I will be looking at is how well can this team recover from adversity. We are going to make some mistakes I would like to see us recover quickly from those mistakes and move on to the next play," Young said. Young said she is certain that after the team goes over the May 28 game at practice and work on a few things it will win its next game that was scheduled to be played June 4 at Skyview Sports Complex Field number one. She said although the team did lost this game there were some positive things that came out of the game. "We did some good things tonight. Our pitcher, Monica Figueroa, who has played on the all-Air Force team, really did a good job tonight and she really pitched well. Our defense played well after some early lapses and it could be a strength for our team as the season progresses. I have been working with the team on placement of the ball and they did a good job with that tonight. I was really satisfied with how they hit in the key situations we had tonight. We really did a good job of hitting behind runners when we had runners on base," Young said. Young said there should be some bright days ahead for the Peterson team after it grows out of the newness of playing with each other and the newness of playing together for the first time. She said the first game only served to show the team how they can take a few small discrepancies out of its game and turn it into positives. "This is the first season that we have ever been together since we haven't had a team here in seven years. Considering the lack of time we have played together our ladies played well tonight. Tonight I thought they actually tried too hard. You could see that in the way we batted. I thought some times we tried to do too much with the ball instead of just relaxing and hitting to spots and following through and letting the ball go where we need it to go. We will get to the point where we play our kind of softball," Young said.