As a youngster, Mackenzie Knight resisted playing softball.
That was her older sister Madison’s sport. The timeless sibling impulse to do something else was strong. But eventually, she followed her sister’s path.
“Growing up, she never wanted to play softball just because I always played softball, and she’s like, ‘Oh, I wanna do something different,'” Madison Knight said of her sister. “A couple years later, she came around to it, and she’s like, ‘I’ll try it.’”
Mackenzie kept following the path and is now is one season away from reuniting with Madison on the same softball team — at Syracuse University.
Madison Knight only got to play one high school season with Mackenzie when the latter made the varsity softball team at Patterson Mill as a freshman in 2022. Madison graduated that spring.
“When I was a senior and she was a freshman, I think we just [said], ‘This is so cool.’ We never got to play with each other throughout all of our years of playing softball, just the age gap was too much, I guess,” Madison said. “So then once the season ended, it was just like an end of an era because it was, ‘Man, this is really probably never gonna happen again.’ And in the back of my mind, it was, ‘Only way it is [happening] is if she ever goes to Syracuse.'”
While Madison was making an impact in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Kenzie was carving her own path at Patterson Mill. Her sophomore season with the Huskies, she hit .609 with 53 hits and 15 RBIs, en route to being named The Aegis 2023 softball Player of the Year.
Per NCAA rules, college coaches can not contact a softball recruit until Sept. 1 of the athlete’s junior year in high school. Mackenzie had cast a wide net for herself when it came to college recruiting preparation, attending camps at Coppin State, UMBC, Delaware, Stony Brook and Saint Joseph’s.
But when it came time to get down to business, one school stood out above the rest.
“I mean, come Sept. 1, Syracuse was my first email and my first scheduled call. The actual call lasted about five minutes, and by that time, I knew that I wanted to go there,” Mackenzie said. “The other schools that emailed me, I did consider myself going there, just interested in going there, but I felt more connected to Syracuse in a way because I had this one already going there [pointing to Madison].”
The pair’s bond was apparent in Madison’s reaction to Mackenzie’s college decision. The 2023 ACC All-Freshman Team selection was overjoyed by the news that was just a back-of-mind contemplation in the year before.
“I am in tears and I’m like, ‘Aw! You do you, but that’s my bet,’” Madison said about hearing of Mackenzie’s Syracuse offer.
Madison’s softball career at Patterson Mill had a lot for college coaches to love. The all-around standout took home Gatorade Maryland Player of the Year honors in 2021 and 2022 and led Patterson Mill to the 2021 Class 1A state championship as a junior.
Ranked the No. 1 recruit in Maryland by MaxPreps, Madison’s recruiting experience entailed over a month of nightly calls with coaches in conversations that spanned a couple of hours each. By the end of the process, she was worn out, her father, Jason Knight, recalls, but Syracuse had climbed from a surprise interested party to a finalist alongside Penn State.
After evaluating what was originally over 20 schools, Madison landed with the Orange thanks in part to their staff’s openness to having her not only pitch but also hit and potentially play another position when not in the circle.
Madison Knight pitched 93 2/3 innings for the Orange in 2024, second only to senior Lindsey Hendrix. Knight’s 2.91 ERA and 1.32 WHIP in 22 appearances ranked 15th in the conference and second on the team, respectively.
The power-hitting label showed up this season, too, as Knight was busy when appearing at first base and designated player. The elder sister recorded 20 RBIs and hit six home runs, five of which came in an eight-game run ending April and into May.
However, Syracuse, and anyone familiar with Maryland softball know that Mackenzie is far from Madison’s clone.
“We’re literally the complete opposite,” Madison said. “I pitch and I’m a power hitter. She’s an outfielder [and] slapper.”
Mackenzie’s style is a product of working through some initial struggles until she found her footing at the plate. Mackenzie battled early in her career to find success batting as a lefty rather than as a righty or situational switch-hitter.
“When I was hitting in the right-hander’s batter’s box, I knew that it wasn’t going anywhere for me. And then I became a switch hitter and hitting lefty — when that didn’t work out, went to righty when I had two strikes — that didn’t normally work out, either,” she said. “And then, I just kept working on being lefty, and I feel like that just worked out so much better for me, just being a lefty instead of a righty.”
At Patterson Mill, she’s been a fixture atop the batting order, a table-setter for the team’s other power hitters to chase home. All the while, she’s kept growing into a Division I caliber player in her own right.
Her numbers came down slightly after her monster sophomore season, but she still hit .494 with 38 hits. She also stole 24 bases.
Now, the sisters are poised to bridge what they hope will be new frontiers for Syracuse softball.
“Teams I’ve played for have lived by this since I was 16: leaving a program better than how you found it,” Madison said. “Coming to Syracuse, we were just barely making the ACC Tournament. I think the next step for us as a program is to make a regional.”
The Orange were one-and-done in the ACC Tournament this season with a 1-0 loss to Boston College in the bracket’s first game, but Madison highlights the fact that SU did beat Virginia Tech and Florida State twice in the regular season, both of which wound up being top-three seeds in the league.
Madison and Mackenzie, who continue to work out and practice together at Absolute Sports Performance in Abingdon when their schedules permit, will soon enough have the treasured chance to help Syracuse and coach Shannon Doepking reach the next step.
“Coming in with her, she’s got a big class coming in,” Madison said about Mackenzie’s 2025 Syracuse peers. “We got a big class coming in now. I think it’s just trying to leave it better for them than how we found it so they can do the exact same thing when they come in and leave it better than how they found it.”
Until then, expect the sisters, both PA Chaos travel products, to sharpen each other as much as possible.
“Growing up and being able to compete off of each other, I can help her, she can help me in some senses — she sees stuff that I don’t even see,” Madison said, later adding, “it’s being able to feed off of each other and knowing that we both want it so much that it’s a one-two punch kind of thing.”
The two would not share a dugout at Syracuse until spring 2026 when Mackenzie will be a freshman and Madison will be a senior.
Madison called it “such a surreal moment to be able to play with her with my last season playing softball.”
“I wouldn’t want to end it any other way, really,” she said.
