Q: What do you want your team's identity to be?
My thing that I tell the girls all the time is that defense wins championships and offense sells tickets. That's kind of the mindset that I'd like to see us have. If opposing teams can't score on us, they can't beat us, so I'd like for us to be a defensive-minded softball team.
Q: Who will be the primary contributors of this year's squad?
We're still a really young team. None of our girls even have a drivers license yet. That being said, I'd really like to see our sophomores — Carla Herrington, Mia Miciello, Jaylah McNease, Erin Stoetzner and Peyton Hanks — step up as leaders for the team. I think we can be a good team this year, but if those girls can step up and lead the way, we can be a great team.
Q: How do you build off the lessons y'all learned last year as a young team in your first season?
When I came here, it was a bit of a late hire, so I got here late in the summer, practically right before the school year started. That being the case, we really didn't have much of any offseason workout programs or conditioning programs. We had about three or four months to try to get some things installed before the season. Any time you're trying to change a culture, it's tough, and I felt like the kids did the best they kid to put us in a position to be successful. But this season, we've basically stripped the program down to the ground level, and we're focusing on quality over quantity. It's not what we do but how we do it that's going to separate us. With the work we were able to put in over the summer and the fall, I do look for us to be a lot more competitive this year.
Q: As someone who's become accustomed to competing for state titles year in and year out, what's it been like for you to enter this process of changing the culture and building a program from the ground up?
Really, this program kind of reminds me of when I first went to Sumrall before going to Wayne County. There are a lot of similarities. Coach (Greg) Arnold did a great job before I got here, but our mindset is that we want to achieve things that have never been achieved before in this program, and to do that, you have to do things differently than you have in the past. Once we get that mindset established that we're here to compete for championships, and they get that taste of what it's like to see their work paying off on the field, the ball will get rolling, and we'll get to where we want to be.
