And the winner of the 2012 FHSAA Softball State Final is…Durant. With the agonizing feeling of defeat, by a score of 8-2, still fresh in the girls softball players’ minds, this year provides an opportunity to regain the softball crown. In this comeback season, fourteen women stand ready to take the field with only one goal in mind: to win districts and eventually get back to states and win the right to call themselves state champions.
This year’s team is mostly made of underclassmen with the majority of them being juniors. The players have a higher level of energy, enthusiasm, and motivation because they want to impress all of the coaches and further their development on the diamond.
“By having an overall younger team, our team is more energetic and has more excitement to be out on the field,” junior third baseman Karra Brown said. “Being influenced by my teammates makes me want to bring in more energy into my work and try to play harder and on a much higher level on the diamond so that I may impress my coaches and teammates.”
To help improve and reinforce skills required by ballplayers such as speed, strength, and hand-eye coordination, some of the players also play in traveling squads in which the teams are more competitive, more athletic, and more skillful than teams in the high school circuit.
“Playing on a traveling team, like the Miami Stingrays, is more competitive because the skill level is much more intense,” junior outfielder Megan Greenwell said. “This traveling team has helped me improve my skills in a numerous amount of different areas such as being more agile which helps my acceleration to quickly get around the bases, speed which helps me run and catch the ball more quickly, and hand-eye coordination which improves my reaction time to spot the ball in the air and precisely catch the ball and get the out.”
New personnel will hopefully catapult the softball program to the state championship. This year, former assistant coach Emilio Exposito was promoted to the head coach position. Exposito wants to get back to states, and his status as a long-standing member of the softball program has only benefited the players on their quest for victory.
“Mr. Exposito has been on the team since I was a small freshman,” senior catcher Emily Rodriguez said. “Having him as a head coach made the transition between the former and new coach easier because he has been on the team for all these years but now, as head coach, he can be a little bit more interesting to work with because he has a tendency to be more strict and more organized around us than usual.”
Overall, the softball players have a strategic plan that will allow them to go back to the state final and recapture a crown that they believe should have belonged to them all along.
