The Heritage softball team concluded their pre-season on a good note Wednesday as they toppled Locust Grove 6-3 in a scrimmage.

Head softball coach Jason McBay says that he expected his team to be rusty and make some mistakes, but overall he liked what he saw.

"Initially we've got a lot of stuff to improve on. We made some careless mistakes," McBay said. "I felt like our youth showed, but I thought we played pretty well for our first outing."

"I figured we would make some early baserunning mistakes, maybe a couple errors or just make mistakes early on. I felt like we played pretty hard and just made some things happen."

Three of the Patriots' usual starters were sidelined with injuries, but McBay said that the girls who played in their positions stepped up and did a good job. In practice on Thursday, McBay said that the team had the opportunity to work on the mishaps from Wednesday's scrimmage.

"We have situational practices. A couple of situations that we got wrong, we got those right yesterday (Thursday) in practice," McBay said. "That's kind of what we do, we just take it game by game. We usually make notes on the things we need to improve on. After each game we'll talk about it. The next time we practice we specifically focus on those things."

With the first slate of games coming this weekend in the South Gwinnett Tournament, the scrimmage proved valuable for the Patriots and the young team.

"I think our youth showed a little bit in our scrimmage, but you gotta play to get better. As time goes by we'll correct those things, we'll be okay," McBay said.

Overall, McBay said he was impressed with the team's aggressiveness, defense and speed. He said that those were the foundation of the team.

"I liked our team speed. I liked our defense. I feel like those are two of our better qualities," McBay said. "Our pitching did a great job. We threw all three of our pitchers and all of them did a pretty a decent job. We didn't hit the ball as well as I would've liked, and executing some of our offensive plays, we didn't get bunts down. We missed a couple opportunities with that."

"We're going to be an aggressive team, and kind of get after people. I expect them to do that every game we play, just to go out there and want it more than the other team," McBay said. "I hope as we go forward in the season we continue to learn from our mistakes and make less and less of them."