Jackson County’s Lady Panthers softball teams are warmed up and ready to get the season underway. The fast-pitch team is in the second year of a four-year plan to rebuild and the slow-pitch team is an oddity, in a sense, since so few schools maintain a team.
The fast-pitch team, coached by Tommy Fountain, started working out in June two days a week. Due to the number of players that were involved in travel ball the team was unable to participate in any camps or summer leagues.
According to Fountain, the team has 14 girls on roster, with four returning starters.
Junior Amber Harper, and sophomores Brooke Griggs, Becca Nelson and Brittany Sims round out the returning players. Fountain said that he is expecting big things from transfer student Jessica Laird, also a sophomore. The rest of the team are fresh faces and are the key to the rebuilding effort that the team is working on.
Despite being a young team, Fountain thinks that this year will show improvement.
“We’ve got an incoming freshman pitcher by the name of Haley Shinall, who is the real deal,” said Fountain. “She’ll be our ace on the mound and give us a chance to win some ball games.”
Fountain also said that the other newcomers to the team were going to make an immediate impact in the upcoming tough season.
“We have an unbelievably difficult schedule, playing only five games against opponents that did not have a winning record last year,” said Fountain. “We’ll find out how good we are real quick, with some very tough games against Mill Creek and Houston County in the first week of the season.”
This year is the second year in the four-year plan to reestablish the softball team. The move to AAA and the tough opponents will give the incoming players experience when they take over as the core of the team.
“Last year, we had a tremendous group of girls that worked hard and took some lumps with a huge amount of character, but we weren’t really at the level to be ready to play varsity softball,” Fountain said. “This year, we’ve grown up some, gotten bigger and stronger, added some pitching and added some very good softball players to an already solid core… we are excited about what is in store for this program.”
