In sports it is not about how one starts. It is about how they finish.

That old saying still holds true today and Lower Macungie Youth Legion is a great example.

The Macs started the summer season by going 0-6. As if losing six straight wasn't bad enough, they lost four of their first five contests by just one run. Fortunately for them, their luck was about to turn around.

Following that poor start, Lower Macungie won eight of its last 11 games to finish the season with an 8-9 record. The sub-.500 mark left them on the outside of the eight-team playoff tournament as Nazareth went 9-8 to take the last spot.

Third-year head coach Andrew Oswald had one word to describe how he feels about the season.

"Overall I'm definitely satisfied, especially if you look at where we started," Oswald said. "We had a fairly young and inexperienced team for this level. For them to come back and win eight of the last 11, I have to give them credit. They gave it their all and worked hard throughout the season."

Oswald knew his team could compete with anyone in the league. But it took the team a while to get to that place. The results definitely show Lower Macungie could compete with the league's top teams.

Three big wins for this squad are an 8-1 defeat over Forks, a 4-0 shutout of North Parkland and an 8-5 victory against South Parkland. The last two teams finished fourth and fifth in the league standings, respectively.

Oswald has a hypothesis as to why his players had a slow start.

"I think it may have been a little bit of inexperience," he said last week. "Some of the players had never played travel baseball before, so they might not have been ready for the level of competition they faced. I also think the change to wood bats was a big part of it. I know everyone was using them, but it took our players a little bit longer than most teams to get used to them. There are hits that a player could get with an aluminum bat that they won't with a wooden one and it took us a while to adjust."

Two players that figured out the wooden bats quickly and successfully were Lukas Wieder and Kai Von Kiel. Both players led the team in hitting at season's end with averages north of .400. Both Wieder and Von Kiel represented Lower Macungie in the Lehigh Valley Youth Legion Baseball League's All-Star Game.

Oswald boasts that he "got very solid pitching" from Jackson Goodman and Vincent Rongione and he said, "I'd try to get those two as many innings as possible."

This past season was a roller coaster ride for the 15 members of the Lower Macungie Youth Legion team. Everything improved as the season went on, from their record to their individual confidence level on the diamond. Oswald did his job to guide these players towards victory and they enjoyed plenty of it in the second half of the season.