Algonac Diamond Teams Hope Matching Successes Lead to East Lansing
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
May 24, 2023
Kenna Bommarito remembers how many people were in East Lansing a year ago to support her and her Algonac softball teammates at the Division 3 Semifinals.
So, she has an idea of how many people from the town would show up if both the softball and baseball teams were there this time around.
“I think everyone would be,” the junior pitcher said.
There’s a decent possibility that Bommarito’s theory could be tested. The Muskrats softball team is ranked No. 2 in Division 3, and Tuesday night clinched the first Blue Water Area Conference title in program history.
That came one night after the baseball team – ranked No. 1 in Division 3 – also won its first BWAC title. The BWAC was created in 2002, and Algonac was an original member.
“It’s amazing – this town loves it,” said senior baseball player Tyler Schultz. “We’ve got a small community, and everybody is tagging along. I remember last year, a couple of our final postseason games, that was the most people I’ve ever seen at a game. All of the sports here are starting to build up. We have athletes all around the school. I think as time goes on, I think each sport will get better and better.”
Bommarito’s imagined scenario nearly played out a year ago, as both teams made their deepest postseason run.
While the softball team was making its historic run to the Semifinal, the baseball team was making one of its own, advancing to the Quarterfinal for the first time in program history.
The baseball team’s movement toward this started with the 2017 and 2018 seasons, when the Muskrats won back-to-back District titles.
“We had a couple DI (college) players, and when you have those players come through, it generates excitement through the youth,” said Algonac baseball coach Scott Thaler, who took over the program in 2017. “It’s been a trickle-down effect from that initial first two years. That really set the bar. We’ve had some really good baseball players come through, and I have a great staff.”
Thaler had stressed back then that he wanted to build a program at Algonac and not have it be a flash in the pan. That certainly looks like it’s happening, and not just because his Muskrats are winning and sitting atop the state rankings.
Algonac – which has fewer than 500 students in the entire school – has junior varsity and freshman baseball teams. Thaler also said there are 25 eighth graders coming into the program next year.
“I think that when I was smaller in little league, we didn’t really have that where we went out on the field with the varsity players,” said junior pitcher Josh Kasner. “Now, that’s gotten a lot better. A lot of the smaller kids we see around town, they know who we are and about (the program).”
Of course, talent wasn’t enough to get there. Thaler needed to instill belief in his team in order to help the younger generation see what was possible.
“I was a (football assistant) coach under Scott Barnhart, and one of the things we preached to the kids back then is ‘To believe in the things you haven’t seen before,’” Thaler said. “That’s the mantra we brought to them last year, ‘Why not us?’ Just because it hasn’t happened before here doesn’t mean you can’t believe in that. We had to get them to believe.”
The Quarterfinal run provided proof beyond the belief for the Muskrats, and then the Michigan High School Baseball Coaches Association added to it all, naming Algonac the preseason No. 1 team in Division 3.
Luckily for Thaler, his team took it in stride.
“I mean, it was a great feeling, but part of me had some doubts,” Schultz said “We’ve got some younger kids on the team, and I thought that maybe they might look at that and might get complacent, but me and some of the other seniors have done a good job of keeping all of these guys looking forward. We’ve still got one goal, and that’s to finish (with a Finals title).”
While the softball team didn’t enter the season with a No. 1 ranking, the expectations were certainly there, as was a new target on its back.
But bigger than both was motivation following a walk-off loss to Millington in the Semifinal.
“I think it just shows us that in those big games with those types of teams, you can never say never,” said first-year softball coach Natalie Heim, who was an assistant on last year’s team. “You really have to bear down. That Millington team that beat us, they fought hard. But I definitely think it fuels us more to get back.”
The softball program’s rise may have seemed more sudden to those on the outside, but senior Ella Stephenson said it had been bubbling for a while.
“My sophomore year, we had some talent for sure,” she said. “We had a really good season, but not as good as junior and senior year. The class above me was really talented. But they kind of turned the program around in my eighth-grade year, and it kind of kept building from there.”
During Stephenson’s sophomore season, the Muskrats lost a tough District game against Richmond, which went on to win the Division 3 Finals title. Not only are the Blue Devils a common early postseason opponent for the Muskrats, they’re also a conference rival. As is Almont. And Croswell-Lexington. And … It’s a brutal conference.
So, much like the baseball team, even during the softball team’s historic 2022 season, winning the conference this spring proved to be tougher than making a deep postseason run.
That made Tuesday night’s sweep of North Branch to clinch the BWAC that much sweeter.
“Honestly, it’s a rush of just happiness,” Bommarito said. “We’re all so excited and just can’t believe we did it. We just played game-by-game today, and really took it one pitch, one out at a time.”
Not only has the BWAC prepared the Muskrats for the possibility of another deep postseason run, it helped keep them focused throughout the season.
“I think a lot of teams don’t have that luxury of facing the best competition during the season,” Heim said. “I think it keeps (the Muskrats) not looking too far ahead. We try to have that approach of one game at a time, one inning at a time, one pitch at a time. It helps with having goals that are a little tougher to achieve. Winning our league, it’s tough. It’s not an easy feat. Especially after last year’s success, it would have been easy to look ahead.”
Now, with league titles secured, both teams can focus on their ultimate goals and the postseason that is directly in front of them.
All with the hope that their similarities – on top of the league titles, both teams are 29-2 as of Wednesday, and both have a University of Michigan-bound player (Kasner and Stephenson) – continue through the third weekend of June with matching trips to East Lansing.
“That’d be unreal. That would be so cool,” Stephenson said. “We all have really good friendships on the baseball and softball teams. Our records are identical. We both won our conference. It’s just really cool. I’m really happy for their success, and ours, too.”
Paul Costanzo served as a sportswriter at The Port Huron Times Herald from 2006-15, including three years as lead sportswriter, and prior to that as sports editor at the Hillsdale Daily News from 2005-06. He can be reached at [email protected] with story ideas for Genesee, Lapeer, St. Clair, Sanilac, Huron, Tuscola, Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Midland and Gladwin counties.
PHOTOS (Top) Algonac pitcher Kenna Bommarito makes her move toward the plate during last season’s Division 3 Semifinal against Millington. (2) Matthew Rix slides into home as a throw comes in. (3) The Muskrats huddle up in the baseball outfield. (4) The Algonac softball team stands together for a team photo. (Baseball photos and softball team photo courtesy of the Algonac athletic department.)
Airport Graduate Villarreal Hoping to Receive Call on WPBL Draft Day
By
Steve Vedder
Special for MHSAA.com
November 19, 2025
It hasn't always been the smoothest of paths for Bella Villarreal – but considering the trail-breaking nature of her quest, she refuses to second guess her choices.
Which is how it goes for someone trying to make the leap from a high school of fewer than 800 students to becoming the first Michigan native to play in the new Women's Professional Baseball League.
A graduate of Carleton Airport High School and presently a freshman at Eastern Michigan, Villarreal's journey includes overcoming her own doubts, ignoring skeptics, poking a hole in a sport universally reserved for males and traveling hundreds of miles to find suitable competition. It's a long and continuing fight she's hoping will culminate in her being among the players taken in the inaugural WPBL draft Thursday.
While Villarreal describes herself as a football fan and someone who could never get into softball, dabbled in basketball and pushed thoughts of playing volleyball to the back of her mind, her first love has always been baseball. It's been that way since before she stepped into her kindergarten classroom and peaked after shining in a WPBL tryout in Washington, D.C., in August.
"I've been drawn to baseball since I was a 4-year-old playing T-ball," Villarreal said. "I've always wanted to play baseball. It's inspirational to me and was always a goal for me to play. I never wanted to stop something that made me feel so good."
While she harbors a deep love of baseball, the sport, however, hasn't always returned that affection. After playing in local boys leagues growing up, Villarreal – a pitcher and second baseman – made the Detroit Bees boys travel team as a 9-year-old. From there she graduated to the Indians Baseball Club as an 11-year-old and then finally more travel ball with the Cubs club as a 15-year-old. She's played in three Baseball For All events, the largest girls baseball tournament in the country.
Along the way Villarreal has encountered support, but also a prevalent attitude that girls who favor a sport with a bat and ball should be playing softball, not baseball. By the time she was 16, Villarreal, by then long committed to a future on the baseball diamond, was having to travel all over the Midwest to find baseball tournaments.
What she found was scattered acceptance among some male teammates, but also a frustration with traveling around a half-dozen states to play the sport she loved.
One of the turning points of Villarreal's fledging baseball career came at Airport High School. After her extensive inclusion in travel leagues, Villarreal made the school's junior varsity baseball team as a freshman and sophomore. While there were bumps along the way, the foremost lesson Villarreal took from that school's baseball program was that she could indeed succeed playing against the boys. She also honed fundamentals and learned the value of everyone pulling in the same direction.
According to the National Federation of State High Schools Association (NFHS), there are no states with girls baseball as a sanctioned sport – but the organization counted 1,372 girls who played baseball on high school boys teams this spring. While Major League Baseball estimates 46 percent of all baseball fans are women, only nine women played on NCAA men's baseball teams in 2024.
None of which has deterred Villarreal's love of the game.
"I worked hard and wanted to be part of the team. I learned that there is no "I" in team," Villarreal said of her time at Airport. "And I think it also confirmed my ability. I knew if I did well in high school, I could do it any place."
Armed with the confidence that she could carve a space in the sport, Villarreal, now 19, has tried to improve her game with twice-a-week hitting workouts and four days of work designed to improve her strength and speed.
The work has paid off. She came away from the first WPBL tryout in Washington, D.C., with hopes of being taken in the draft. The tryout included players from 10 countries, including a dozen from Japan, which has the top-ranked women's team in the world by the World Baseball and Softball Federation. In all, the first day of tryouts included 600 players from across the country and as far away as Australia, Mexico, South Korea, the United Kingdom and France. Cuts were made after each of the four days, with Villarreal surviving all of them. That's a hopeful sign she will be taken in the draft by one of the league's four franchises.
Villarreal admits the tryouts, which concluded with inter-squad games, were high stress.
"Of course I was nervous," she said. "But I made some friends there who helped me stay motivated that I could get through it. It was serious, but everyone had fun, which was a big thing. There were jitters the first day, but then I was good at becoming myself. To make the second and third days, you knew you must be doing something right. I started becoming confident with the things I knew I could do."
Originally slated to include six teams, the league will start play in May with teams in New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Teams will have 15-player rosters which will play a seven-week regular season. It's not the first attempt at forming a professional women's baseball league. There have been four previous attempts beginning with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II and the most recent with Ladies League Baseball in 1997-98.
Villarreal believes given time and enough resources, women's professional baseball can thrive. She would love to look back on her time as being among the trailblazers in that progress.
"Absolutely, there is interest," she said. "I know there have been attempts before, and some really haven't stuck. But I think we can build it up to a place where girls have more of an opportunity."
For those girls who would someday wish to join that quest, Villarreal has advice.
"You should know where you're supposed to be," she said. "Do what you love as a challenge, and just be who you are. It doesn't matter what sport you play – know that you are capable."
Editor's note: Villarreal was drafted in the fifth round of the WPBL Draft by Los Angeles, the 82nd pick overall of 120. She was selected as a second baseman, and was one of two Michigan players drafted. Jordan Eyster of Royal Oak, a 21-year-old outfielder, was selected in the fourth round by San Francisco.
PHOTOS (Top) Airport grad Bella Villarreal watches from the dugout during a USA Baseball Development Program event. (Middle) Villarreal steps to the plate as a member of Carleton Airport’s junior varsity baseball team. (Below) Villarreal takes a photo while pointing toward her mother Tonya. (Photos provided by the Villarreal family.)