The 5A and 4A titles sport neighboring zip codes. Between them, the two schools graduated 16 players, a Gatorade player of the year and a pitcher who went 19-0.
BROOMFIELD — The eleven-run inning is what people remember.
Broomfield batted around against Legend in the bottom of the fifth at Aurora Sports Park last October, turned a tied state final into a 17-7 win and took the first softball championship in the school’s history. Avery Gines went 3 for 4 with four RBIs. Heer and Gines hit back-to-back doubles to pull even at 7. Then the Eagles just kept hitting.
What nobody in the stands was doing that afternoon was counting seniors. There were 12 of them on a 19-player roster.
Two days of the same tournament produced a second champion with a Broomfield address. Holy Family, seeded third in 4A, spotted top-seeded Windsor a three-run first inning and answered with six in the fourth to win 7-4. It was the Tigers’ fifth state title and their first since 2021.
The 2026 season opens Thursday. Both programs are defending. Neither is defending with the team that won.
What Broomfield lost
The Eagles went 26-2 last fall and did not lose to a Colorado opponent. MaxPreps ranked them first in the state and fourth in the country. Ireland Heer was 5A player of the year. Kale Gilmore was coach of the year.
Every all-state selection on that roster has graduated. Heer and Lilly Smith made the first team. Gines, Lauren Martinez and Kiley Wheaton made the second. All five are gone, along with seven other seniors.
Seven players return: Myah Becker, Brynlee Taga, Kohyn Pottorff, Malia Zufall, Ella Smith, Callie Smith and MacKenzie Haas. Becker was on the field in the final and reached base three times.
Colorado Preps published its preseason rankings Tuesday with Broomfield fifth in 5A, behind Legend, Cherokee Trail, Eaglecrest and Lutheran. The team it beat for the title is now ranked four spots above it.
That ordering is defensible. Replacing a player of the year is one problem. Replacing 12 of 19 roster spots is a different one, and it is the kind of arithmetic that does not usually resolve in a program’s favor inside a single season.
What Holy Family kept
The Tigers lost less, and what they lost was larger.
Emmaline Humphreys went 19-0 with a 0.81 ERA and 284 strikeouts, won 4A player of the year, won the Gatorade Colorado softball player of the year award in June and signed with Stanford. Across the state tournament she struck out 30 Windsor batters in 13.2 innings, then gave up one unearned run in 6.2 innings of the final.
She is a 2026 graduate. So are Jaelyn Sandoval and Giuliana Magnetti, both first-team all-state.
Coach Moriah Nguyen had already started building for this. She handed sophomore Carly Tooley the ball to start the state championship game rather than burn Humphreys, and explained the decision afterward in terms that read differently now than they did in October.
“Em can’t be the one to keep us in games,” Nguyen told CHSAA.
Tooley is a junior. So are Dalynn O’Blia, who made the all-state honorable mention list as a sophomore second baseman, Lindsey Morris, Lauren Delgado, Graci Baker and Addie Whitworth. Aaliyah Hill and Bella Karasow are seniors. The freshman class that arrived in 2025 is now a sophomore class.
Colorado Preps has Holy Family second in 4A, behind Eaton. That is a smaller drop than Broomfield’s, and the roster explains why.
Thursday, and then Aug. 21
Holy Family opens at home Thursday against Monarch at 3:30 p.m., one of only five games scheduled anywhere in Colorado that day. Broomfield waits until Aug. 21, when it plays a doubleheader that starts at Holy Family at 9 a.m. and continues against Riverdale Ridge at 11.
The 5A champion at the 4A champion, eight days into the season, before either team knows what it is yet.
Neither result will settle anything. The classifications separate them in October, and CHSAA has not published its first rankings of the season, which historically arrive two or three weeks after opening day. What the game offers is the earliest available read on which rebuild is further along.
The regular season ends Oct. 10. Regionals follow Oct. 16-17, and the state tournament is Oct. 23-24. That gives both programs roughly nine weeks, which is less time than a football team gets and considerably less attention.
Eaton, the 4A preseason No. 1 and Holy Family’s likeliest obstacle, returns catcher Emma Anderson, an Arizona commit ranked 105th nationally by Softball America. Legend, which Broomfield beat in the 5A final, is ranked first.
Both title defenses start Thursday afternoon in Broomfield.
