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When Jr High Softball starts at the end of summer, for most teams it just means a continuation of what the players have been doing since spring. Playing softball. Not so for the Wirth Lady Warriors. For Coach Kevin Kruse it means teaching the game at its most basic level. While other teams are working on the finer points of the game and have girls who have been playing all summer, Coach Kruse is teaching girls the basics of throwing, fielding, hitting and running. While most teams begin practicing a few weeks prior to the beginning of school Coach Kruse must wait for school to start. This is just one of many problems for a program that has no recreational summer leagues or select teams to draw from. Coach Kruse said, “This is actually only the second week the team has been together. We didn’t have a full team until after school started. I have one eighth grader, 3 seventh graders and the rest are sixth graders. A lot of these girls have never played before. We’re trying to help them understand the game and have some fun in the process.”
With no Khoury League or select teams to feed the Jr High and High School programs, inexperience and lack of knowledge when it comes to the basics of the game becomes a huge hurdle to overcome, especially when the schools you play have an abundance of talent and experience. I asked Coach Kruse what he felt was his biggest need or concern? He responded, “The biggest problem is if you don’t have a pitcher the games get out of hand. Our girls understand that. When you’re in the field and the pitcher is walking everybody it’s hard to stay active and involved with the game. So that’s why I work so hard with pitchers and trying to get girls interested in it.”
This is Coach Kruse’s fifth year coaching the Wirth Jr High squad and the Cahokia Senior High squad. With a background of coaching select teams in Florida, Chicago and the Highland/Troy area he’s been associated with skilled, talented teams and has the knowledge necessary to lead the program. There are a few players on Coach Kruse’s who do have experience. He has four girls on his team who played over the summer for teams outside of Cahokia. While that’s better than zero it’s only four out of nineteen. Coach Kruse stated, “This is really a totally different level of skill than what I’ve coached in the past. This Jr High team is almost like starting out at the T-ball level. You can’t treat them like kids who play at that level because they’re older and want to be treated older. It’s a long process and slowly but surely we are seeing the turn around at the High School level.”
With a team so young and inexperienced I asked Coach Kruse what he does to keep the girls interested and involved? Especially when you consider that most of the teams on their schedule will field teams of eighth graders and that can mean some long innings in the field. He answered, “I try to keep girls rotated in and out. I try to thoroughly explain everything. I do set a high standard. They know what to expect from me.” Another way he works with the girls is by using his Varsity players in practice to teach the girls. “My High School players help the girls become accustomed to what I want and how I want it done. They know that what I really want is 100% effort from them. In addition the High School girls give them someone to look up to and then it’s not just Coach telling them what to do.”
I asked Coach Kruse if he had a wish list for the softball program what would be at the top of the list. He said, “We need a summer softball program in Cahokia. I can’t do that because it’s against IHSA, IJHSA and IESA rules. We need to get some others involved to help with that. Many of our parents are too busy; some volunteers decided it’s not worth their time. So getting together a solid summer program for these girls has been difficult. We had a Khoury League in Cahokia but that folded and now someone else has purchased the fields and they are converting them to soccer fields. That’s great for the soccer program but in the process we lose fields to play on if we do get some teams together.”
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