Softball players hit milestones
Published 1:30 am Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Two senior Wildcat softball players hit major milestones last month.
Pitcher Reese Wasinger threw her 500th career strikeout in an 11-2 win on April 15, then threw the first no-hitter of her high school career in a 20-0 win on April 21.
“It was just incredible,” Wasinger said. “Five hundred — we were talking about it at the beginning of the season, and it wasn’t even something that I knew I could even do this season, much less to do it with a couple weeks left.”
Short stop Layla Suto recorded her 100th career hit in a 13-1 win on April 23.
“A lot of people don’t see it as difficult, but only playing 80 high school games — getting 100 hits — it’s a pretty big deal for me,” Suto said. “I think it shows that if you put in a lot of work, things can happen like that.”
Oak Harbor won its fifth game in a row on Monday, amounting to what is now a 12-9 record overall this season, according to the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association. Contributions from both players, who served as team captains for the first time, have been crucial.
Collegiate softball awaits both players. Suto committed to the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota in September, and Wasinger to Rhodes College in Tennessee last summer, schools belonging to NCAA Division II and Division III, respectively.
These accomplishments are a long time in the making. Suto has only played softball for the last four years, but has played baseball since she was four years old. Outside of school practices, Suto plays on the Washington Avengers, a travel team based in Auburn. During the winter sports season, Suto quarterbacked the school’s varsity flag football team.
“I grew up watching it, and then started playing,” Suto explained of her lasting love of the sport. “It was just something that I stuck with.”
Wasinger’s love of pitching began around age 8, when she took a lesson and stuck with it despite breaking her arm early on.
“I went right back and I have not stopped since,” she said.
What Wasinger loves about pitching is how involved the position is in everything that happens in the game. That is also what makes the position so challenging.
“Softball is a truly hard thing to do, and therefore it makes it so rewarding when you can get it just right,” she explained. “It’s really exciting to be able to go out and every game’s different.”
