A Softball Southern Belle?
By Kristy Miller and Halley Scott
“They can not be any dirtier, sweatier or nastier,” jokes long-time girls fastpitch softball coach and father, Dr. Danny Story, 49, of Jackson. “They are just as dirty as when we (boys) were coming in from two-a-days in football. They have scars on their legs, on their knees. …”
And these girls love it. Danny and their mother, Holly, are raising softball ladies.
All four Story girls play, or have played, fastpitch softball. Sarah, 20, was a catcher for 10 years; Emily,
18, plays third base; Janie, 16, is a second base; and Maryanna, 11, has a lot of ability.
All are beautiful. All are cultured. And all have game.
“You’ve got to have balance,” says Emily, who is the “girliest” of them all, according to her sisters. “You can look pretty and dress up. But then, in sports, you’ve got to have some fun.”
Janie has watched Emily develop into a serious competitor. As for Janie, it came naturally. “Girls are tougher than you think,” she says. “You never know the toughness of a girl until you see them out there playing softball or soccer. Sports bring it out of us. … But, then, off the field, you’re just a girl.”
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Fastpitch softball is exploding in Mississippi. Recreational leagues thrive. High-school teams send scholarship players to college. Mississippi has more than 30 girls’ fastpitch select teams traveling as members of the United States Fastpitch Association of Mississippi.
A certain “sisterhood” develops on a girls’ softball team that is hard to match, the Story girls say. Young ladies learn to rely upon
each other.
“One of the main aspects of girls’ fast-pitch softball is commitment,” insists Emily. “You have to know each other’s strength’s and weaknesses.”
“You have to trust each other,” adds Janie.
Sarah, now a sophomore at Ole Miss, was corralled into
playing catcher early because she had a strong arm. She grew to love it because of the relational aspect it offered. “I got to see the whole field and I played a big part by being in tune with the pitcher. It was a really good position to be encouraging
to everyone.”
And while Southern softball belles are fierce competitors, coaching them is different than coaching boys, Danny Story says.
Danny first coached softball when Sarah was a third-grader. “We were getting down on the girls, just like we would do with guys. Yelling. … Throwing our hats. It didn’t take us long to figure out that that didn’t work with girls or with
their mothers.”
Coaching his daughters and their friends has made Story a better person, he says. “It’s been good for me personally to be more of an instructor rather than just getting on them. Girls will get their feelings hurt. They can
get emotional.”
With a girl, Danny corrects out of the limelight. “It’s almost better to call a girl over to you and not get onto her in a public way.”
His daughters laugh as Danny offers his big tip for starting a softball season off right. It’s all about having the right verbiage in the team’s opening letter. Story and his coaching partner, George May, will often write something like, “Now girls, here’s the most important piece of information—the outfit color.”
“It’s not a ‘uniform’,”
Danny judiciously notes,“It’s an ‘outfit’—and you stress the color.”
As the girls get older and the softball more competitive, the older players still like to yuck it up. Once a year, one of Emily’s coaches brings a slip-and-slide, connects it
to a water hose, and the
team works on sliding—
and some fun.
The Story girls loved playing in their recreational league, as well as for their high-school team in Jackson,
The Veritas School, which has quickly grown to field a highly competitive club.
Holly, the family’s team mom, says they try to remember to be “humble winners; gracious losers.”
To 11-year-old Maryanna, who loves sports, Holly often says, “This is a gift to be used for God’s glory.”
Danny adds: “What you want to teach the girls is that they can glorify the Lord in sports—win or lose—by how they act on and off the field; how they treat the other team—win or lose; and how they compete.”
Getting dirty, sliding hard into second, diving for an outfield ball—all that’s good, too.
That’s how Softball Southern Belles are born. SS
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