South softball star pitches perfect game

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In a softball game on April 18 against then-undefeated Hewlett High School, South High School Sophomore Isabella Secaira-Cotto was so focused on each pitch she threw, she did not realize until she was celebrating the team’s victory that she had pitched a perfect game.

“She’s so in the moment,” Coach Demetri Adrahtas said. “She’s one pitch at a time.”

Adrahtas said that when all of the girls on the team were celebrating their 2-0 victory, he asked her if she knew what she had just achieved. Secaira-Cotto then replied, “Yeah, we just beat Hewlett.” Adrahtas then told her that she had pitched a perfect game.

“I had no idea,” she said.

The perfect game was not her only victory that night, however. Secaira-Cotto was also responsible for driving in both runs. Those accomplishments would not have happened, she said, if it were not for her teammates. “My team that I played with was fantastic,” said Secaira-Cotto. “They were so great offensively and defensively.”

To become a successful softball player, Secaira-Cotto practices 45 minutes to an hour six or seven days a week. Part of that practice includes working one-on-one with Adrahtas, a separate hitting coach and a separate pitching coach. “She puts in so much extra work,” Adrahtas said. “It makes a great role model for the other kids and they see what it takes to be better.”

She started out playing baseball on the Rays Little League team. She became interested in softball when she was about 10 years old on the Valley Stream Little League softball team. One day, her Little League coach asked if anyone wanted to pitch, and from there the rest was history, according to her father, Damian. “She loved it from the moment she threw her first pitch,” he said.

Secaira-Cotto made the varsity softball team as an eighth-grader, and she is now an All-County Pitcher. She said she would like to continue playing softball through college.

But softball is not her only love, her father said. She is also an all-county viola player and enjoys painting and drawing. In fact, her favorite teachers at South High School are art teachers, he said. When Secaira-Cotto was younger, she also took ballroom dancing classes, but stopped taking lessons to focus on softball.

“She’s a typical teenager,” Damian said. “She loves to have a lot of fun.”

Coach Adrahtas also said that he is proud of her softball accomplishments, but added that as great as she is on the field, “she’s an even better person and a better student.” On April 19, he honored her with a letter to the other faculty members at the high school. “He said that Isabella was one of the kindest people who walked the hallway,” her father said.

The Lady Falcons’ next game will be on April 28 at 1 p.m. against Carle Place.