With only 10 players left, Cabrini’s softball team wants to win the conference for its last season

Kaitlyn Delaney crossed home plate, contributing to a three-score rally for her softball team, the Cabrini University Cavaliers.

They were still trailing Pennsylvania State University’s Brandywine campus by four runs during the second game of a doubleheader Tuesday night.

“We’re chipping away,” Delaney, a senior psychology major from Bel Air, Md., said confidently.

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Cabrini won their Atlantic East Conference championship the last two years. This year, just making it to the end of the season will be a monumental victory for the Cavaliers.

When the university announced in June that it would close at the end of this academic year, the team went — just like that — from 20 players to 9, said the head coach, Chris Protesto. Some students transferred to different schools.

But left were eight seniors and one junior determined to have a season, and a coach determined to give them one. These seniors were the ones who lost the end of their senior year in high school to COVID-19.

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“It’s easily been the most challenging season I’ve ever been involved in,” Protesto said.

It takes nine players to field a team; one injury or one sickness could cost them a game or end the season. Protesto’s daughter, Brooke, a Cabrini junior, agreed to become the 10th player so the team would have at least one to spare. The teams Cabrini play typically have twice as many players, Protesto said.

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“We’re holding our breath every time somebody gets hit by a foul ball,” he said.

Delaney had a little rib problem last week, but the athletic trainer was able to find a remedy.

Third baseman Kelsey Huling, of Lewes, Del., has been weathering an injured ankle and sore shoulder. Her mother said she didn’t even want Huling to play this year.

“I haven’t amputated them yet,” Huling said of her ankle and shoulder, shortly after scoring a run. “I’m glad I can put it on the line for the team.”

Shoulder problems have been the most prevalent, said Joe Friedrich, the trainer.

But the season is almost over — just four regular-season games left and then the playoffs, which the Cavaliers already have made.

“For 10 girls, they play their heart out,” said Becky Huling, Kelsey’s mother, as she watched her daughter on the field.

The players had to be versatile, some moving into positions they hadn’t played before. The team also lost its home field, which it had been leasing from Valley Forge Military Academy. So the school this year depended on the generosity of other colleges to host its games. (Rosemont served as Cabrini’s home field on Tuesday.)

Assistant coach Steve Byrnes, whose daughter, Avery, plays on the team, wore a T-shirt Tuesday that said Cabrini Softball on the front and One Last Dance, 1957-2024, on the back, noting the year Cabrini opened and the year it will close.

Parents are inspired by the team’s tenacity in what will be the university’s final season, but sorry to see Cabrini close.

“It’s awesome, in one sense,” Ned Taddei, father of leftfielder Sam Taddei, of Weehawken, N.J., said of the team’s season, “but it’s sad and emotional in another.”

Just making it through the season isn’t enough, Delaney said.

“We don’t want to be known as the girls who played with 10,” she said. “We want to be known as the girls who won the conference with 10.”

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Avery Byrnes, 23, a biology major from Downingtown, also has her eye on winning the conference. She pitched a shutout against Brandywine in the first game of the doubleheader, which the Cavaliers won 2-0.

“That was the best game they played all year,” Protesto said.

They ultimately lost the second game. Their record for the season stands at nine and 11.

Brooke Protesto, a communications major from Downingtown, said she’s glad she returned to the team, which also includes seniors Emma Barbera, Sam Kilson, Madison Gugel and Ariana Mirenda, and junior Dorian Ilyes. She had played her freshman year, then took a break.

“I love the school,” said Protesto, who will finish her senior year at Villanova. “I grew up in the school, basically.”

Her father has worked for Cabrini for 20 years as assistant director of facilities. He, too, will be moving to Villanova. He’s been hired by the university, which purchased the Cabrini campus, to stay on after the closure in June.

“They hired our whole department,” he said. “We have knowledge of all the buildings.”

But before that, there’s a playoff run — and one more significant milestone for this Cavalier.

“I took a couple classes a year for seven years or so, and then when I started to coach softball, I stopped,” he said. “Then the news that the school was closing came out and some of my professors urged me to go back and finish my accounting degree.”

So he did.

Protesto will be graduating next month, alongside the eight seniors on his team.