By TYLER HENRY
Lead Sportswriter - Salina Post
This year’s regional and state softball tournaments will see one final chapter written for the Southeast of Saline softball team, but unlike most high school sports stories, this one didn’t begin four years ago.
Every team has its own story to tell, but very few are as long and winding as that of this year’s Lady Trojans, and fewer still pose the possibility of a true fairytale ending.
SES enters this year’s regional bracket as a 1-seed, 19-3 overall, without a single loss to a fellow 3A opponent.
The Lady Trojans have looked dominant on the field, outscoring their opponents 232-37, posting seven shutouts, and rolling through their league with a perfect 10-0 record to capture yet another NCAA title.
While many would consider Southeast to be a strong contender for the 3A crown, this team's story is about so much more than that, and to find its beginning, we have to go back almost two decades.
Pesha Ptacek discovered her love of softball at a young age and wasted no time passing that love on to her oldest daughter Brielle.
“As soon as I had my sonogram and they told me I was having a girl one of my very first thoughts was ‘I need to start a softball team,’” Ptacek recounts. “I wanted her to have an experience similar to what I had growing up.”
Little Brielle spent many of her early days sitting inside of a bucket at Southeast of Saline practice, watching and learning from the team her mom coached.
By the time Brielle was three years old, barely big enough to hold a bat, Coach Ptacek got her wish, coaching Brielle and her friends on a YMCA youth softball team.
What no one could have foreseen was that this team of tiny toddlers, consisting of Lexi Jacobson, Maddie Harris, Brookelyn Adams, Chase Gilpin, Carly Commerford, and Savannah Sutton, would eventually form the core of one of the most formidable softball juggernauts in the state of Kansas.
In the coming years, more mainstays like Bryna Baird, Jayci Burgardt, Aba Pearson, and Adyson Rohr would join the team, and with that, the Salina Adrenaline was born.
When the girls were seven years old, Coach Ptacek took them to their first softball tournament, to try their hand against other teams in the area.
So how did a group of some of the most fearsome future pitchers and hitters in Kansas fare at their first competition?
It turns out, not well.
“I was joking with the girls about this the other day but they had no idea how awful they were in the beginning,” Ptacek said. “At our first-ever tournament, we got run-ruled three times and came straight home.”
Not disheartened in the slightest, Coach Ptacek cooked up a scheme to help her team take a jump and better prepare them for what was to come.
“My philosophy was to pick one thing each season that nobody else was doing to help get us ahead,” she said. “In our first season that was baserunning, in the second season, we started bunting, and from there we worked on fake bunts and slap hits. We wanted to be the first to learn these things to cause frustration and get ahead of the curve.”
In another innovative move, Ptacek and her fellow coaches allowed those interested in pitching to start learning the art long before they would be able to pitch in a real game, throwing balls of rolled-up socks against the wall to practice form and footwork.
All of this worked like a charm, and by the time the team entered middle school, a squad that didn’t win a single game in their first local tournament, was competing and winning larger tournaments across the region.
“Our growth was so gradual that I can’t tell you when we got good,” Ptacek said. “We really weren’t good when we started but we grew to be alright and eventually we grew to be really good.”
As the team steadily improved on the field, something far more important had happened behind the scenes — this group of young girls, and their coach, brought together by their love of a simple game, was no longer just a team, they had become a family.
Every triumphant victory, every heartbreaking defeat, every shattered pair of bright pink sunglasses, skinned knee, and scare of a deceased umpire who was, in actuality, just asleep, brought this group closer together.
“I have learned more from them than they’ve learned from me,” Ptacek said. “I’m a better coach because I got to start from the beginning with them. I’m very aware that there are things I did right and things I did wrong but we all had the luxury of growing together.”
Ptacek, who took a hiatus as head softball coach at SES, planned to hand the gift of these girls to some lucky coach when they entered their freshman year.
That was the plan, but as fate would have it, she would be the lucky one, resuming her post at Southeast before a single member of the Adrenaline entered ninth grade.
“I was excited to get this group at this level,” she said. “We knew they were talented kiddos, but I think the pressure to perform right away was very high.”
In their first two years playing together at the high school level, the team finished 16-6, with two losses in the regional semifinals.
Last year, SES finally broke through, finishing 22-4 and punching a ticket to state where they won their quarterfinal matchup, and finished fourth in Class 3A.
Despite all the success that this team and many of its individuals found, not one of its seven seniors will move on to play at the next level, and with the Adrenaline choosing to forego a final summer season, this will be one last ride in every sense of the word.
While that finality could create unwanted pressure, the Lady Trojan dugout had found peace knowing that no matter what happens in the coming weeks, the team has already achieved what it set out to do.
“This group is special because we’ve done all this together,” Ptacek said. “The goal was never college scholarships, the goal was to find girls who love the game of softball and want to pass that love on.”
Every family eventually sees its members leave the nest to pursue their own dreams, but by blood or by water, families like this one, founded not only on a common love of the game but of one another, tend to stand the test of time.
“These girls have been like a second group of daughters to me,” Ptacek said. “While I’m thankful for the time I’ve gotten to spend with my own daughter, I’m also grateful to all the other parents for the time I’ve gotten to spend with theirs. I’m so thankful that they trusted me to grow with them and the sacrifices they’ve made is not lost on me. Experiences like this tend to tie people together, but I will deeply miss the time that I’ve gotten spent with these girls.”
Southeast of Saline will open postseason play this Monday when they take on Russell in the quarterfinal round of this year’s Hoisington regional.