For most who play youth sports, the ultimate achievement they could hope to aspire to as athletes is to become a champion at the high school level. Every year, a few achieve this goal -- and even better, some make the highlight reels in doing so.
In Utah, Bear River High School won the state's Class 4A softball championship on Saturday in a game that featured an acrobatic play by one of their outfielders. During the game, centerfielder Olivia Taylor went airborne and over -- and through a retaining fence making a catch in order to try and save a home run.
Bear River would go on to win the game and take the state championship, blowing out Tooele 14-6 after forcing a third game in a winner-take-all series earlier that morning.
CATCH OF THE YEAR!!! Watch Bear River Center Fielder Olivia Taylor going airborne, clearing the fence to make this catch in the @UHSAAinfo State Championship game. @KSLSports l @BRHSinfo l @BearRiverCoach pic.twitter.com/9aw1f1Fhu5
— Sam Farnsworth (@Samsworth_KSL) May 22, 2021
Bear River came into Saturday's set of games motivated, as they had felt they had missed out on opportunities during a loss to Tooele on Friday. After scoring zero runs on four hits in the first game of the series, Bear River proceeded to score 18 across Saturday's pair of games, including four home-runs.
"After losing (Friday), I think it lit a fire under all of us that we really wanted to win," Taylor said in a report by Patrick Carr of the Standard Examiner. "We knew — we left nine runners on Friday — and we really wanted to get those runners scored today."
Bear River's state title was the tenth such triumph in school history, and came with shades of their first 20 years ago. In 2001, Bear River had won their first state championship in softball by defeating none other than Tooele, their opponent over the weekend.
