St. Peters Mustangs Softball Hang Tough In CBSA Girls Select League

CHESTERFIELD – Head coach Dan Cattron can describe his St. Peters Mustangs girls 16-under club softball team in three words.

“Jekyll and Hyde” is what Cattron calls his group, which throughout this summer has made a habit of playing great in one game, then not-so-great in the next.

And true to form, Tuesday night in a Chesterfield Baseball/Softball Association Girls Select League doubleheader, the Mustangs played a fantastic game in a 3-1 win over the STL Nemesis, but then played poorly in a 15-0 loss to Patriots Softball.

“That’s just kind of typical of our team,” Cattron said. “We’re just that way. This is a group of girls that we started off a few years ago as a rec team. Pretty much we can play up to (our) ‘A’ level, or sometimes down at the rec level. It just kind of depends on who shows up that night.”

In the first game Tuesday night, against the Nenesis, it seemed every Mustang player brought her ‘A’ game.

At the plate, second baseman Hannah Slater, a senior-to-be at St. Charles High had a hit, an RBI, and scored a run to lead the Mustangs, while teammates Katelyn Kuhn, a sophomore-to-be at St. Charles, and Angie Meyer, a senior-to-be at Fort Zumwalt East, each had a basehit and a run scored, as well.

Defensively, Fort Zumwalt South senior-to-be Heather Gump made two sparkling plays at third base to help keep Nemesis batters from reaching base.

And starting pitcher Monica “Mo-Mo” Cattron, a junior-to-be at Francis Howell North, pitched five innings of brilliant ball, and held the Nemesis to just one run on two hits, while not allowing any baserunners after the first inning.

Gump relieved Cattron in the sixth, and got three easy outs for the save.

In the nightcap though, Gump started for the Mustangs and just didn’t have it.

She gave up six runs in the first two innings against a red-hot Patriots team that had won four straight, including a 12-2 win over the Missouri Heat earlier in the evening.

And as it turned out, any runs allowed to the Patriots would have been too much, as their starting pitcher Brittney Lee, a sophomore at Westminster College in Fulton, MO, held the Mustangs scoreless and didn’t allow a hit, in a four-inning game that was shortened due to the lopsided score.

“What I just told all the girls was to forget this game, just put it in the past,” Cattron said. “Last time we played out here, we had the same exact thing. We beat the St. Louis Lasers, a really good team, 5-3. Then we turned around and lost to the Illusions, 11-0. It was almost the identical thing that happened tonight.”

One possible reason for the Mustangs dramatic fluctuations in play might be the fact that the team of mostly St. Peters-area underclassmen are almost always playing up in competition.

Most of the Mustangs players are 15- or 16-years old, but the teams they compete against, in elite tournaments and in the CBSA Girls Select League, have mostly 17- and 18-year old players.

Cattron said they do that so they won’t have to drop or replace their older players. The team has been together for many years, and they’d like to keep playing together.

Still, playing such a tough schedule could make it difficult to enjoy the summer for some teams. But Cattron said his Mustangs are different.

“We make it fun,” Cattron said. “All these girls get along great. They all like each other. It’s a rare thing to see a team of this many girls stay together for this long. And we want to keep them together, so we play an older schedule.”

The Mustangs also play in a league at the St. Peters Rec-Plex, which they dominate, and according to Cattron’s math have an overall record of 14-20 this summer.

“We might have a little better record if we only played 16U,” Cattron said. “But we wouldn’t have the three 18U players we have. And we just didn’t want to break the team up.”

In the CBSA Select League, the Mustangs are now 4-4, which is good enough for second place in the West Division, three games behind the Illusions, who are 9-1.  

The Mustangs will be back in action on Wednesday evening, with two more games at the CBSA.

At 6 p.m., the Mustangs will first take on the Missouri Warcats, a team based out of St. Peters and O’Fallon. Then at 7:30 p.m., it’ll be a showdown against the Missouri Maniacs, a team based out of St. Louis.

Both those contests will be played on CBSA Field # F2.