After COVID pause, AHSAA softball celebrates 25th anniversary

St. James was one of the first softball champions in 1996, the year after the AHSAA began to sanction the sport. (Contributed)

By TIM GAYLE

Fast pitch softball officially started as a championship event in 1995 and because coronavirus interrupted the game in 2020, the 25th anniversary of high school fast pitch championships will be celebrated this May in Oxford. 

“We had shorts when I first started (slow pitch) at St. James,” Erin Stough Tubbs recalled. “I didn’t want to play in shorts. That’s not softball to me. To me, we could have played any boys’ baseball team and beaten them. We were that good.”

Tubbs and her Trojan teammates would win the fast pitch title in 1996, a year after AHSAA officials started the sport by allowing the teams to play both slow pitch and fast pitch during the regular season and choose which version they wanted to employ at the state tournament. Denise Ainsworth elected to continue playing slow pitch softball and led Alabama Christian to a 1995 state championship. Lisa Bridgman elected to switch St. James over to fast pitch and the Trojans won the 1996 state championship in the newer version of the sport. 

“That was a great time,” Ainsworth said. “The girls played just because they loved the game. They weren’t trying to win college scholarships, nobody was coming to watch them play. We didn’t have announcers or anything. They just played because they loved the game.”

But a trend was starting. ACA switched to fast pitch in 1996 and the Capital City Conference was an annual fixture in the state tournament finals for years to come. St. James won 1A-4A in 1996 after the tournament was split into two classifications and Trinity won 1A-3A in 1997 after the tournament went to three divisions.

ACA, which lost to Trinity in the 1997 semifinals, beat St. James in the 1998 1A-3A championship game; won the title again in 1999; lost to Madison Academy in the finals of the 1A-2A tournament in 2000;  lost to Madison Academy in the finals of the 3A tournament in 2001; beat Madison Academy in the 2002 finals; beat Springville in the 2003 finals; beat Dadeville in the 2004 finals; lost to Pisgah in the 2005 finals; and beat Dadeville in the 2006 finals as Ainsworth, the coach who admitted she “knew nothing” about fast pitch, closed out a Hall of Fame career as a coach.

In addition to ACA’s accomplishments, St. James won the 4A title in 2001, 2005 and 2006 and Trinity won the 4A championship in 2002 by beating St. James in the finals. 

After Ainsworth’s decision to step down, Chris Goodman took over the ACA program and promptly won state championships in 2007 and 2009 and reached the finals in 2010. St. James won a 4A championship in 2008, continuing a trend in which CCC teams reached the championship game in 15 of the first 16 seasons of fast pitch softball.  

“St. James put us out of sub-state in 1996 and we lost to Trinity (in the semifinals) in 1997,” said ACA’s Lauren Russell, who won state championships in 1995, 1998 and 1999. “You want the bar set high and I think that’s still the case at Alabama Christian. It’s a different coach and a different team, but if they don’t make it (to the state tournament, it’s a disappointment).”  

But that wasn’t the case in 1994. ACA had lost the state tournament qualifying game to Trinity when the ball got past the center fielder and rolled into Vaughn Road, giving the Wildcats a 1-0 victory. Softball was played at the fast pitch level during the summer, but few high school teams, almost all of which played slow pitch, took it seriously.

“It’s just awesome how far the game has come,” Russell said. “I have nieces that play and just to see what we did back then that brought the game to where it is today … we didn’t have a field to practice on and played our games when Faulkner let us use their field or at Lagoon. For practice, we just threw down rubber bases in a grass field and that was our practice field. I think that’s what made our defense so good. It helped us develop character, it helped us learn how to roll with the punches.”

It would be years before the private schools in Montgomery had fields to practice on and the public schools still don’t.

“We practiced 13 years without a field,” Ainsworth said. “We practiced in a grass parking lot at Faulkner. When we were playing slow pitch, we played where Dalraida church is now. Center field was uphill, home plate was downhill. If you hit it over the center fielder’s head, it was lost in the woods so it was a home run.”

As the new experiment was unveiled in 1995, high school coaches who had taught their players how to play slow pitch suddenly faced a dilemma.

“You had all these kids that played fast pitch in summer ball, so they didn’t really want to play slow pitch,” said then-St. James coach Lisa Bridgman. “I had never played or coached fast pitch. They switched over and Ken Carter came on as my assistant and he was the difference maker because he knew the game. And Denise was a great resource and mentor for me because any time I had a question or needed advice, that was the person I would call.”

Ainsworth, meanwhile, started the season with the fast pitch schedule and went 0-6, then switched to slow pitch on the way to a state championship. 

“We started part of the season fast pitch and then went to slow,” she said. “We did it opposite of what most people do but we knew we had a shot to win the slow pitch (championship) that year. I was getting a lot of pressure from parents wanting us to go all fast pitch but I knew we had a shot at winning the slow pitch.

“It was tougher on me than the girls because I grew up playing slow pitch and felt comfortable with that. Fast pitch was absolutely alien to me. I knew nothing about fast pitch. Because all my girls were playing (summer league at East Montgomery League), their parents were saying, ‘Well, they don’t know anything about slow pitch, they’re playing fast pitch.’ So we went fast pitch the first part of the season. We went 0-6 the first six games, if we played any more after that I don’t know.”

Russell, an eighth grader at the time, was one of those players trying to juggle two styles in one season.

“We won the state in slow pitch, but we did the first half of the season in fast pitch,” she said. “Softball is softball, so you learn to modify. We enjoyed both. It took a little while to get your timing down at the plate, but other than that, it was fun. We had a great group of girls that played together for many years and a great coach. She got out of her comfort zone and did what she needed to do to learn fast pitch. She knew that’s where the game was going.”

ACA had switched to slow pitch by the time it faced Capital City Conference rival St. James, losing to the Trojans 18-13 and 17-15. St. James’ only loss in the regular season was to 6A Robert E. Lee (8-6), finishing the season 16-1 as it headed into the playoffs. 

Tubbs was ineligible to play that first year after briefly attending Catholic, but recalls how excited the players were at getting to play for a championship in fast pitch softball.

“The only time we played slow pitch was at St. James,” she said. “I was in middle school and played for the varsity. We were like, ‘slow pitch is not really a sport.’ When I was in middle school, all my high school teammates, that’s all they had played for school ball.”

The playoffs in the first year of fast pitch included all classifications and St. James lost twice to Robert E. Lee in the section tournament, then twice to eventual state champion Robertsdale in the sub-state tournament. Tubbs recalls a “very intimidating” atmosphere at Robertsdale as the Trojans’ efforts were hampered even more by the loss of catcher Ashley Arrington to a broken leg during the series. 

The Trojans wouldn’t face the same obstacle in 1996. Robertsdale won the 5A-6A state championship in fast pitch, while St. James won the 1A-4A title. The Trojans, which had lost three times in five regular-season meetings with ACA, won two out of three against the Eagles in sub-state competition to advance to the state tournament, where they went 4-0. 

The Trojans eliminated Catholic from postseason play in 1996, while Trinity beat ACA in the 1997 semifinals on the way to the 1A-3A championship. In 1998, ACA won the 1A-3A title by beating St. James in the finals. Often, the toughest competition in the state during that era was down the street in the form of your Capital City Conference rival.   

“I think it goes to show you, too, that our summer ball teams were good,” said Tubbs, a pitcher for Montgomery Gray. “We won the World Series in 1996. You had AUM, Montgomery Gray and East Montgomery. Playing all those years of summer ball prepared all those kids for their school ball. We very rarely went on vacation because my summer was all-stars.”

Those early pitching stars set the tone for fast pitch softball in this state, Bridgman and Ainsworth noted.

“In baseball, you had a whole bullpen of pitchers,” Bridgman said. “We would have a pitcher and that pitcher would throw every game. Erin Stough pitched every game in the state tournament the first year we won it. Lyndsay Mann was that type of pitcher as well. She would just pitch non-stop.”

“The Capital City Conference was very, very competitive but we all loved each other,” Ainsworth said. “We all talked to each other and picked each other’s brains. We talked to each other about life, not just softball. It was a great time to be a coach in the city of Montgomery. We were close-knit and there were some great pitchers in those early years.”