By Laura Clark

Published: April 2, 2008

2007 recap: 9-7 record; tied for third in the Dogwood District; lost 1-0 to Buckingham in the first round of regionals.
Key returning players: Marti Helbert, senior outfielder; Arielle ‘Peanut’ Giles, senior catcher; Melanie Yoho, senior third baseman/pitcher
Coaching staff: Toni Donigan, head coach; Vicki Crawford, assistant coach

Four questions for coach Donigan:
Q: How is the team shaping up?
A: The group we have, they’re young and inexperienced, but they’re willing to learn. So what we’ve been doing is a lot of the basic things. Basic drills: how to field, how to catch, how to cover bags. They’re just young. They’ve never played at this level. I keep telling them, “We really have a JV team playing on a varsity level.” Because I have five freshmen, four sophomores and three juniors, plus three seniors.
And mainly the freshmen are starting. Honestly, somewhere along they’re all going to play an important role along the way. Right now, Natalie Campbell is starting at short (stop). We’re doing some changes right now. We got through the scrimmages and two first-season games. They’re just young, and we told them when we lost 6-0 we made great strides because we finally played seven innings. The first two games we only played five innings. But we’re playing against tough schools too. We had Wilson Memorial, who went pretty far last year. We played Monticello, who’s always good. And Buckingham, who went to the first round of state (last year). So we had a tough preseason with non-district games.
We open our district season next Wednesday against Altavista, so we’re still mixing and molding and trying to figure out who’s going to go where and who’s going to do what. We had three practices over spring break. We’re hoping with that practice over spring break we’re going to come along. We’re working on basic fundamentals, fielding and hitting. We had four hits in three games, and you know, that’s not going to win a ball game.

Q: Who are we going to see on the mound?
A: Kim Maddox, who is a junior, will pitch some. And Melanie (Yoho). They’ll be sharing the duty because Melanie plays third. Kim’s probably going to pitch and Melanie may relieve her, depending on the situation or Melanie start and Kim come in for her. They’re the only two pitchers we have.
This is Melanie’s first year really pitching-pitching. She did a little bit last year. She realized that we didn’t have a pitcher so she took it upon herself to work on her pitching. She pitched in JV years ago, then quit pitching for a while.

Q: What are your early-season goals?
A: To get to seven innings and to score. We’ve had trouble scoring. With four hits you’re not going to score. They’ve got to be a lot more aggressive at the plate. I feel like they get in there and they’re not wishing for a walk, but they’re not attacking for the strikes. Vicki tells them to quit fanning at the ball. We tell them, “Quick hands, quick hands, quick hands.”
Deborah Pugh, a ninth-grader, has had two of the four hits. This freshman group, they’re young, they want to play, its just playing at the next level. I’ve got freshmen playing against juniors and seniors on other teams. I think we’re going to compete. I think there may be surprises as the season progresses. They’re going to get better.
We were working on, here’s an example, checking the runner. When you have a runner on second and third, check the runner, then throw to first. They check the runner, then when they go to throw, it’s a wild throw. So that’s just things they haven’t gotten down. They’re doing what we want them to do; there are just errors and mistakes in between.

Q: What’s it going to take to get into postseason play?
A: Lot of hard work. We want to get better each game, and when we get into district playoff, everybody’s back to zero. Anybody can advance at that point. What we’re doing now is playing for seed, where we’ll be seeded at the end of the season. Even if we’re in last place at the end of the season and we have peaked and we’re where we need to be, we can still go to regionals. We can still go to state. So our goal is to get better and better and when we reach that peak we’ll be in the playoff.