Salisbury Press

The first game of Salisbury’s legion doubleheader against Lower Mac didn’t go as planned Saturday. An 8-1 defeat handed the Falcons their first loss of the young season.

But they responded when the two teams took the field in the evening. Led by 15-year old Will Rodriguez’s complete game, one-run effort, Salisbury took game two of the doubleheader, 6-1 on its home field.

Although still months away, the scene will look drastically different when the Salisbury boys basketball team takes the hardwood in the winter. But summer basketball fans are getting a glimpse of what next year’s team will look like.

Without graduates Jaxon Costello (a Colonial League First Team all-star) and Ryan Slutsky occupying the paint, Salisbury will shift from a post-heavy team to one that hopes to take advantage of its speed. And while it has looked different this summer, the Falcons are adapting well to that change for the most part.

Last year’s Salisbury Connie Mack baseball team won the regular season championship. A banner hangs on the fence at the high school field just behind home plate acknowledging those Falcons and their feat.

Now, many of those same Connie Mack players have moved up to the legion level looking to get a team back on track that has struggled in recent years. And through two games, it looks like the Falcons have carried that momentum over to the legion ranks.

The month of May has been a memorable time for Salisbury baseball head coach Mike Pochron. He was recently re-elected for his second six-year term as judge in Magisterial District 31-1-08.

And a couple days before to that re-election, Pochron reached an elusive milestone on the baseball diamond. Salisbury’s final win of the 2017 season, a 7-1 victory over Dieruff on May 12, was Pochron’s 250th as head coach of the Falcons’ varsity baseball team.

The milestone was a complete shock to Pochron when he was notified of it after the game.

Salisbury seniors Mason Groff and Ethan Heydt have teamed up together to play some Ping-Pong, and were teammates on the Falcons’ boys soccer team that won districts in the fall. The two even played some video game tennis, but never had that duo played together on an actual court prior to a couple of days before teaming up for the District 11 Class 2A doubles tournament.

The Salisbury softball team nearly made history on Friday night. In the program’s first Colonial League championship game appearance since 2002, the Lady Falcons had an opportunity to earn their first conference title ever.

For most of the game, it looked as if No. 6 seed Salisbury was bound to upset top-seeded Bangor and earn that elusive title. The Lady Falcons led 8-3 early and 11-6 after five innings.

You have to go back to 2010 to find the last time Salisbury failed to make any sort of playoffs. That season marked the last year the Falcons had not qualified for districts or the Colonial League postseason tournaments.

While 2017 wasn’t supposed to be the year that Salisbury broke its streak of six-straight district appearances, a slow start snowballed into a disappointing finish that saw Salisbury lose its final four league games.

The Salisbury softball team controlled its own destiny with two games remaining. It wasn’t be an easy road to qualify for the Colonial League tournament as the Falcons had to face the West Division’s top two teams in Northern Lehigh (13-4) and Southern Lehigh (13-4), but their fate was still in their own hands.

Even two losses could have positioned the Lady Falcons in the league tournament as one of the six qualifying teams, likely the sixth and final seed.

Of the set of six softball games at Pates Park on Saturday, the fourth game between Salisbury and Wilson figured to be one of the most competitive at the Colonial League’s Play Day event.

The Lady Falcons must have missed that memo.

Much like the rest of the five games that were decided by at least 10 runs, Salisbury, too, followed suit with the blowout victories. The Lady Falcons (7-3 overall; 6-4 Colonial League) used a nine-run sixth inning to separate themselves from Wilson (6-4) and defeat the Warriors in six innings, 15-1.

The Salisbury boys’ tennis team finished last season one win under .500 in the Colonial League and captured six wins in conference.

The Falcons have already surpassed that win total this season and they’re not even midway through April.

Since Salisbury (9-1 in Colonial League; 10-3 overall) dropped its first league match to reigning champion Moravian Academy last week, the team has started a new winning streak. The Falcons responded with convincing wins over Hamburg (3-2) the following day and Notre Dame (Green Pond) (4-1) to open this week.