Every step forward Addison D’Andrea took in her softball career over the last five years came in lockstep with North Tonawanda. Eventually they reached the top of the Niagara Frontier League and Section VI came in tandem.
When D’Andrea was an eighth-grader. North Tonawanda head coach Emily Grampp took over and the Lumberjacks went 12-7 and every year since then the team has improved, culminating in a 19-1 campaign this year and a trip to the Class AA state quarterfinals.
The Lumberjacks won their first NFL championship since 2004 and their first Section VI championship since 1998. It wouldn’t have been without D’Andrea.
The senior hit .464 with seven home runs, 27 RBI and 26 runs to earn NFL Player of the Year honors. For all that, Andrea has been named the Greater Niagara Newspapers Player of the Year.
“When the five of us came up, I don’t think people expected the team to be as good as we were,” D’Andrea said. “… Our eighth-grade year we had a winning record. … People just didn’t expect us to be good that next year and we did and then every season from there we got better. So I definitely think that the program was left in a better place than it was when a few of us started.”
When the All-Western New York small-school first-team selection first joined Grampp’s junior varsity team in seventh grade, Grampp knew she was a special player. The head coach knew the kid had passion and potential to set records.
D’Andrea drove in 85 runs, with 21 of her program-record 22 home runs over her final three seasons. But her career didn’t start smoothly. D’Andrea wasn’t a full-time starter for North Tonawanda in her first varsity season in 2022.
She kept working.
Throughout her career, D’Andrea has worked with a hitting coach to perfect her swing while also spending time making sure she could compete defensively. Whenever she did get into slumps, her hitting coach would be able to pinpoint what was going wrong and help her fix it.
“I think Addison kind of not being a full-time starter her first year was kind of surprising to her,” Grampp said. “She was obviously already a very good player, her eighth grade year and I think that made her hungrier and want to get even better so that she could be a full-time starter and get more accolades as she goes through her career.”
Between 2022 and 2025, North Tonawanda did not finish lower than third in the Niagara Frontier League standings. The struggle to get over the hump came, in part, because of a 4-12 record against perennial NFL champion Niagara Wheatfield and frequent runners-up Grand Island over those four years.
North Tonawanda also struggled to go on deep postseason runs over the first four years of the Grampp era, failing to make it past the semifinals in any of those seasons.
But that changed this year in a big way when North Tonawanda went 4-0 against Niagara Wheatfield and Grand Island, outscoring them by a combined 30 runs. In those four games, D’Andrea hit .769 with 11 RBIs, eight runs and three home runs.
In the postseason, D’Andrea had her best day at the plate during the Section VI championship game against defending state champion Orchard Park, going 2-for-3 with two RBIs in an 8-3 win.
“I would say it wasn’t really learning how to win but more learning how to battle back from setbacks,” D’Andrea said. “As a team we had many losses that hurt us and it was learning how to rebound from those losses to become better and tune up those areas we struggled in.”
At times, the struggles went beyond the field for D’Andrea. That includes last summer, when D’Andrea was going through the recruiting process to decide where she wanted to continue her career collegiately.
She was receiving interest from various programs including a couple Division I schools and got an offer, only for that school to rescind it. D’Andrea had begrudgingly moved on when the school tried to offer her again.
The offer wasn’t worth more than the coach’s word, though. D’Andrea wanted to play for a coach that didn’t waiver on the desire to have her on the team.
Instead, D’Andrea chose to play for SUNY Geneseo in the fall. It is the school that stood out above the rest of her options because of the coaching staff, and maybe, most importantly, the fact that she will be heading there alongside two of her travel softball teammates.
She is heading to Geneseo because the coaching staff have her best interest at heart while also having success on the field. It is especially noteworthy given that this past season was head coach Rosie Phillips’ first at the school and they went 30-11 and hosted the conference tournament.
“I’m proud of all of it,” D’Andrea said. “I’m proud of myself because I know I faced a lot of adversity as a player, especially last summer. I had some stuff go down with my recruiting and it definitely took a toll on me but in the end I ended up going where I know that I was meant to be and I couldn’t be happier about that.”