George County softball building off deep playoff run with a hot start to a new season
The George County Rebels are turning hard lessons into winning strengths in 2023.
Led by coach Kasey McCann, a few upperclassmen and a dearth of freshmen filling the dugout, the Lady Rebels are off to a scorching 14-2 start to the season while coming off the heels of an improbable postseason run.
Less than a year ago, GCHS wrapped up the regular season third in its district and entered the postseason as an afterthought. Then it won six straight and left 2022 as South State runner-ups.
It was in great part thanks to McCann’s decision to spark the team by calling up several middle schoolers and inserting them into the lineup in critical moments.
Those were “hard decisions” for McCann then, but they’ve led to positive outcomes that continue to spill into the new season.
“We had to keep grinding,” senior Irina Sanford said about the upperclassmen’s response to the call-ups. “There’s (middle schoolers and freshmen) coming up and they want to take our spots.”
Sanford is one of two seniors in the lineup, along with Ashton Fairley, and is the team’s leader in hits. The rest of the card varies greatly in age and skews sharply toward the inexperienced. Of the nine players with at least 40 plate appearances, four of them are eighth or ninth graders.
And that’s not including Peyton Collins, an eighth grader who has thrown more innings from the circle than anyone else on the team.
“I was very nervous, I mean, they’re all way older than me,” Collins said about being a seventh grader on varsity last year. “It just scared me. I feel like I belong now, like I fit in better.”
The dynamic between the experienced players and the youth, from junior Gracie Magee in the circle to freshman infielder Blakely Slay, has been a cornerstone for the Lady Rebels.
Magee has the lowest ERA on the team at 1.40 and Collins has complimented her with over 70 strikeouts. Sanford and Fairley are pushing 50 hits together, while freshmen Ary Dixon, Jordyn Bradley and Slay have scored nearly 40 times in 16 games.
“They’re very special,” McCann said. “I know that they’ve been playing together for a while, some of them have, and they’ve grown up together... They’re eager to do just about anything we do and they do a lot of things really well. I haven’t had a team quite like this... I’m blessed.
“They work well together. They’re really good people. They mesh well and they’re very compatible.”
There’s still plenty of softball left in the season, but GCHS has already won several key games that bode well for the team’s future. The Lady Rebels own a 10-2 win over reigning South State champ East Central and followed it up with a 4-3 extra-inning victory over a strong Vancleave club.
That gives the Lady Rebels a 2-0 start in district play after going 2-4 last season. The region is still among the toughest in 5A after producing eight different playoff series wins last year and more battles with the Hornets and Bulldogs loom on the Lady Rebels’ schedule.
“Our goal is to get to South State, go to state and finish off what we didn’t get to last year,” according to Sanford.
This story was originally published March 21, 2023 at 3:52 PM.
