Tuesday, Jul. 01, 2008

Olathe Excellence: Softball teams continue dominance

Editor’s note: This story is the second in sportswriter Andy Marso’s series highlighting the three high school sports in which Olathe is most dominant: football, softball and soccer. He examines Olathe’s rise to prominence in each sport, the youth programs that feed the city’s success and the possible future standouts who may take the field for the high school teams in the coming years.

Dan Eakin swears he never intended to turn Olathe into a hotbed for fastpitch softball. He only wanted his four daughters to stay active.

“We sat around for a couple of years, and then all of a sudden I saw the ad — in the (Olathe) Daily News of all things — for softball sign-ups,” Eakin said. “My daughters were doing nothing during the summer and I said, ‘This has gotta change.’”

Eakin, who went to Michigan State on a football scholarship, always thought he would end up coaching on the gridiron. He instead became one of the city’s first youth fastpitch softball coaches.

Now look what Eakin — and a few others — have wrought. Though Olathe East’s unprecedented run of four state titles came to an end this year, one easily could argue that the city never has had a better overall season in the sport.

Olathe Northwest, Olathe North, Olathe East and Olathe South combined for a 75-19 record. Northwest finished second in the state, North finished fourth, and East made the state quarterfinals.

Perhaps most impressively, the four teams finished first through fourth among the 12 teams in the Sunflower League, rarely losing except to each other. To put that feat into perspective, Northwest coach Mark Mahoney — who was named North Georgia Coach of the Year at his previous job — said the league was as tough as any he had seen.

“Georgia’s very, very impressive because we could play a lot longer,” Mahoney said. “We played year-round, and I mean truly year-round. But in terms of the pitching and the depth hitting-wise, I’d put the Sunflower League up against almost any other league nationally.”

It wasn’t always that way. Warm-weather states have an obvious edge when it comes to baseball and softball because it’s nearly impossible to simulate game conditions indoors.

But Eakin and other area softball pioneers like Frank Barnes and Ed Cline created a bastion of opportunities for young girls in Olathe in the 1970s and 1980s. Barnes, a longtime summer coach and the head of the Johnson County Community College team, and Cline, who opened an indoor softball facility in Olathe, joined Eakin to lay the foundation for today’s Olathe high school softball dominance.

Other local club coaches like Paul Cacavo, John Moppin, Lee Graybeal, Dave Jones and Eric Hughes expanded the softball scene even more, spreading an uncommon wealth of knowledge and passion for the game throughout the city.

Many of them helped build up the Olathe Girls Softball Association, which now includes dozens of youth teams and hundreds of players who feed into the high schools ready to dominate.

“We’ve got a community that has a very strong organization for youth development,” East coach Jeff Hulse said. “With T-ball, with coach-pitch and right into 10-and-unders and 12-and-unders, there’s very competitive leagues.”

The early years

Olathe’s rise to softball prominence initially got a boost from the signing of the Title IX legislation in 1972 that provided many more college athletic scholarships for women.

Olathe residents Bill and Irma Thompson had a daughter, Deana, who grew up playing softball in the years immediately after Title IX.

“That was before there was such a thing as college scholarships for softball — they were just getting started,” Irma Thompson said. “(The players) really realized that they were on the forefront of something.”

The level of play in the city was light years behind where it is now, though. The Olathe Girls Softball Association was in its infancy, and girls played second-fiddle to the boys on the baseball diamonds.

Their access to equipment and facilities was limited.

“The first ones played at the Kansas School for Deaf,” Irma Thompson said. “There was a little field over there on the south side of the campus. They played over there in cut-off jeans and T-shirts.”

Eakin joined the OGSA in 1979, determined to give his daughters and their teammates better places to play. He noted that KSD had only two fields, neither of which had lights.

“And this was before Black Bob Park and Prairie Center; there was just Two Trails Park,” Eakin said. “Well, the boys, the sacred boys, they had their lighted fields. Yeah, boys baseball is big in Olathe, I’m not knocking it. But we were like the back of the bus.”

Eakin became OGSA president in 1980, a post he has held off and on (and currently holds) ever since. That gave him even more clout to lobby for better facilities.

In 1982, the city opened two lighted softball fields at Two Trails Park, which had hosted only baseball. A year later Eakin and Cline, who was a competitive men’s softball player, formed a travel team called C&E (for “Cline and Eakin”) Sports.

Deana Thompson was one of Eakin’s early players. She also went on to play for the city’s first state high school championship squad at Olathe North in 1984 and earn a scholarship to Pittsburg State.

“We won every tournament we played in, and that was about six or seven tournaments,” Eakin said.

Olathe goes national

Eakin and Cline’s team was the start of a tradition that extends to the present day — all-star club teams made up of the area’s best softball players traveling across the nation to seek top-notch competition.

They were able to compete at that level because Eakin had brought “windmill-style” pitching to Olathe. Many of the girls who were getting started were soft-tossing pitches underhand or “sling-shotting” with a short backswing. But Eakin had seen men’s players whirling their arms around multiple times before releasing the ball to ramp up their velocity as early as the 1940s, when he was in elementary school.

He started a pitching clinic to teach Johnson County girls that style in 1981 and has had it every year since.

“Just make your arm go around, throw the ball and scare the bejesus out of everybody,” Eakin said.

Windmill-style pitching is the norm all over now, but Eakin’s clinics still draw a crowd, and it’s hard to argue with the results. His alumni include current Northwest ace Hannah Dale and North ace Sarah Espy, both of whom posted ERAs under 0.50 this year in the Sunflower League.

Under Eakin’s direction, Olathe softball players have continued to have success on the national level as well. His 18-and-under Gold team, the Kansas City Peppers, made a national tournament by going 5-1 at a regional qualifier in Auburn, Ala., June 6 to 8.

The Peppers beat some of the top teams from Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Their 14-player roster includes eight current Olathe high school players or alumni — Espy, Haley Brown, Michaela Hupp, Eranne Daugharthy, Marissa Ingle, Jessica Brooks, Kristen Rock and Laura Vickers.

Eakin may not have gotten his dream football coaching job, but he’s brought a bit of gridiron grit to high-level softball.

“I’m old-school,” Eakin said. “I think I get my points across to the girls with a little discipline.”

Stay tuned: More to come

Eakin’s Peppers are hardly the only successful club team in the area. Olathe alone has more than 20 squads, with names like the Metros, Slammers, Bullets, Flash and Rockets.

Then there are teams like the Kansas City Zephyrs and the DeSoto Belles, which also include a smattering of Olathe players. Aside from Eakin, Barnes was perhaps the forefather of summer softball in Olathe, coaching more than 1,000 games for a team called the Roadrunners before taking over at JCCC.

By taking Olathe girls across the nation and playing the best teams from coast-to-coast, the travel teams have prepared local players for the most pressure-packed situations. Even the competition at the high school state tournament pales in comparison.

“I tell my kids you have to pay a lot of money to get an education like that,” Eakin said. “In 1986 we went to the nationals in San Antonio and drew the Orange County (Calif.) Batbusters in the first game. We were shell-shocked. They beat us 9-0, and it could have been 19-0. There’s an education for you.”

The Olathe players have been climbing the national ranks ever since and have become the model for Kansas softball. With the OGSA still busting at the seams with young talent and underclassmen like Vickers and Northwest freshman Jacinda Ramos just coming into their own, the Olathe softball scene looks stacked for more success in the future.

The youngsters have plenty of role models to look up to, with local alums like

Casey Gorrell (Illinois State), Val Chapple (Kansas), Ashley Shartzer (New Mexico) and Teddi Ewing (Michigan) having gone on to play NCAA Division I.

“If you look at our kids who have gone on to play collegiately, I think it’s safe to say those kids feel that they’re very well-prepared,” Hulse said. “They feel like they can compete against the best softball players in the country.”

They’ve come a long way from playing in cut-off shorts and T-shirts on the bare-bones fields of KSD.

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