As the softball season progresses, it stands to reason that the Minnesota Top 25, the Star Tribune’s statewide ranking of the state’s best teams, would start to show some clarity.
However, things aren’t coming together as cleanly as one would anticipate.
Take Minnetonka, for instance. The Skippers were unranked prior to this week. But with a 10-0 start and a senior stalwart in the circle in Emily Campion, they appear at No. 4 this week.
Don’t overlook seventh-ranked St. Cloud Crush — a cooperative of St. Cloud public schools Tech and Apollo — either. They’ve lived up to their nickname, scoring 10 or more runs in four of their last five victories.
The Crush aren’t the only team from the “Granite City” clobbering the ball. St. Cloud Cathedral also earned a Top 25 spot at No. 17 with its perfect 9-0 record and an offense averaging 13.9 runs per game.
Kudos to Randoph head coach Dennis Trom, who last week picked up his 200th career victory as the No. 5-ranked Rockets improved to 10-0 with a victory at Le Sueur-Henderson, a notoriously tough place to win. In Trom’s 10 years at the helm, Randolph has won the Gopher Conference championship 10 times, has qualified for six state tournaments and has two state titles.
A few teams dropped out of the Top 25 this week, including Anoka, Rogers, East Ridge, Cretin-Derham Hall and Jackson County Central.
That is not a slight to those teams. I expect each to reappear in the Top 25 later this season.
