Player of the Year Sborlini was complete player for Upper Merion

Olivia Sborlini’s numbers do a lot of talking for themselves.

The senior is the all-time wins leader at Upper Merion with 50 career pitching victories. She and her teammates won four straight SOL American championships, in fact, she only lost four conference games in her entire career. It’s not just pitching for the right-hander either; her bat is a force in the top of the order.

Sborlini is complete player and that was never more apparent than in her senior season. Capping off her career in record-setting fashion, Sborlini has been picked as the Times Herald’s Softball Player of the Year.

“We’ve all been very competitive since we were young, I don’t know where it comes from,” Sborlini said. “We try to compete with each other, we want to get better and better and because of that, we’ve always been competitive.”

Late in the season, Sborlini won her 47th game for the Vikings, setting a new school record then won three more games before the season ended in the District I Class AAA semifinals. While the righty said it’s an honor and a great accomplishment, she also adamantly stated the record was far from her own.

Without her trusted catcher Micaela Ghanayem and her defense behind her or the bats giving her runs, Sborlini said she wouldn’t have been able to do it. The Vikings had eight seniors on the roster and they helped shape the team’s success the last four years.

“We’ve all been friends and playing together since we were 10,” Sborlini said. “I think playing together since we were so young helped because we all know how each other are and how we all play.”

In her senior season, Sborlini went 16-3 with a 3.39 ERA, allowing 56 runs in 93 innings of work. She struck out 93 batters against 31 walks. At the plate, the No. 2 hitter in the lineup batted .493 with 41 RBI and scoring 32 runs. A total hitter, Sborlini had 34 hits with 10 doubles, three triples and four home runs.

As a four year starter, Sborlini worked hard every year to improve herself as a pitcher and a hitter. In the circle, she made a big choice to change her pitching style during her freshman year.

“The style I had, I wasn’t gaining any speed and if I wanted to pitch I needed to change it up,” Sborlini said. “I needed to get faster and needed my pitches to move. It was a lot of mechanical stuff and how I delivered the pitches. It worked out pretty good.”

As the No. 2 hitter, Sborlini often faced different situations when she came up to bat. Sometimes, it would call for her to bunt if leadoff hitter Dezerea Kandy had reached first, other to put a ball in play. Learning to read the situation and make the right plays was something Sborlini put time and effort into doing.

She said it was still tough even with experience, but she credited her coaches and her parents Mark and Kelly for giving her feedback and analysis during and after games.

“It takes a lot of work and sometimes it’s hard for me to think about all the situations,” Sborlini said. “Learning the situations has helped me be more relaxed playing the game and more confident that I know what to do and when I need to do it.”

This year, the righty said she put more effort on keeping her focus on one pitch at a time and trying not to think ahead or behind. Every pitcher runs into jams and for Sborlini, getting through those spots relied a lot on trust.

“I thought about staying together to get through the innings and knowing we could get any runs back,” Sborlini said. “My offense would back me up so knowing how our offense worked, when we got in jams, it worried me, but I knew we could get runs back.”

With the core of the team having its last ride together, the Vikings set some big goals for themselves. They wanted to finish a four-year SOL American title streak and finally do it without a league loss then qualify for the program’s first state bid. While UM fell short of states by one game, Sborlini said it was still a good season and the seniors were able to do something nobody else had.

UM was close to going unbeaten last year before Upper Moreland upset them on the final day of the season, so that was motivation to get it done this year. But the team didn’t start out playing way it should have been and Sborlini pointed to an early loss against Methacton as the wake-up call it needed.

“We went into that game thinking we were going to blow by every team we saw,” Sborlini said. “It showed us that we needed to keep working hard.”

Sborlini will be continuing her career next year at Kent State, where she said she’s been recruited more as a position player. Still, once Kent State entered the picture, it was a quick process to commit and doing so allowed her to reach a longtime goal of being a college athlete.

“I realize I’m going to have to fight for my spot and I’m going to work hard to get it,” Sborlini said.

Many of Sborlini’s favorite memories the last four years have come off the field, a majority on the team’s bus rides to and from games. On the field, Sborlini said it was more a culmination of all the team was able to accomplish and being the first group to do those things.

Upper Merion is off to the Pioneer Athletic Conference next season and will go with a young and very different looking team. While Sborlini and her classmates won’t be there, what they did the last four years has set a high bar.

“We left a mark for them and a bar we set so they have the motivation to try and fill our shoes and win a lot of games,” Sborlini said. “We look back on the last four years and realized what we’ve done and how much we have accomplished knowing nobody before us has done this at our school.”