SACCO: Fort, Draft’s youth could leave rest of district behind

While Stuarts Draft coach Michelle Campbell might speak in a quieter tone about her team, the confidence she has in the future of her girls still comes through.

Sure, they still make mistakes. Sure, sometimes errors can be their soft spot. And, yeah, maybe they’re not ready just yet to compete with the big girls in the area, but it’s no secret that her Cougars, with a good JV squad and quality group of youngsters playing in Little League, are going to be around for a while.

So if you want to hear it spoken softly whilst her team waits for a big stick, go ahead and listen to Campbell speak of her team. It’s motherly — almost like she doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings or let the secret out just yet.

“The future,” she says, “is definitely bright.”

Just don’t go walking over to Fort Defiance coach Max Hill and expect more of the same. Don’t look for a dainty answer from him, please.

It’ll be a long wait.

Hill talks of the Cougars the only way it seems this coach knows how to talk: in baritone bravado.

And having coached a lot of these girls from his Fort team and the Cougars in summer ball, he knows the talent waiting to explode in the land of Sweet Candies and Sweeter Cakes.

“Draft’s going to be a force the next few years,” he says. “They are not going to go down, they are going to keep moving up.”

Couple that with the program he’s built at Fort Defiance and, to be kind, none of this bodes well for the other three teams in the Southern Valley District.

With Wilson Memorial — a school set to join the fray next season — the verdict will be out until 2010. The Hornets are young, too, and have a history of making good things happen.

But it doesn’t take years of studying the delicate intricacies of softball to understand any of this. All you need to do is get off your duffs, head out to a few games and scan the rosters to see that a majority of the good, young talent in the district is confined to these two schools right now.

This should come as a shock to nobody with any inkling of the softball diamonds in Augusta County. Heck, for years you’ve been hearing about Draft’s Lauren Campbell, Emmy Blacka and Morgan Holbert when, as a group of small-town girls, they decided to go to the Babe Ruth World Series. Then you heard about them on junior varsity.

When you’re hearing about teams playing together for this long, well, you usually know how that turns out. (And at Draft, an area that watched a baseball team that had been playing together for years come within a home run of winning a state title a few years back, there’s no excuse for any surprise.)

And Fort is just Fort. A team that 86’ed Turner Ashby’s 87-game then-Valley District win streak and has been on the rise ever since. A Fort team with a freshman pitcher throwing beyond her years — Payton Hill.

And to go along with Hill, the Indians have six underclassmen — four of whom started against Draft on Friday — and two juniors on the roster. They’ll lose only five seniors.

The other teams currently in the Southern Valley just can’t match the talent coming up at these two schools, and if nothing changes in the near future, the Cougars and Indians will be the ones battling for first place every year while the others will be left behind.

This is no “letting the cat out of the bag,” this is no doomsday prediction for the rest of the Southern Valley — we are also keenly aware that things don’t always go as planned in the world of sports. This it just the truth.

And unless something changes, it’s going to be the way of life for a while.

How you choose to announce it – either with Michelle Campbell’s quiet confidence or Max Hill’s resounding bravado – is up to you. But you can hear them both.

Very loudly and very clearly.

The question is, who else in the Southern Valley is listening, and, more importantly, what the heck are they going to do about it?

Follow Jim Sacco, Augusta County’s only award-winning sports columnist, on Twitter at http://twitter.com/PoochPunt