Girls from softball teams in Johns Creek go to city council to stress the importance of having youth recreational leagues and fields in the community

Photos courtesy of Coach McDaniel

Manasa Premanand, Multimedia Editor & Sydney Mulford, Staff Writer

While the Johns Creek area has developed rapidly in recent years, there are still little to no softball resources or opportunities available for girls. The city planners built Johns Creek quickly, resulting in an inability to designate sufficient land for parks and fields. The long-term effects of these are evident in high school teams like Northview’s, which suffers from the lack of locally organized youth softball leagues and fields. 

 Senior Kelsea Moody, pitcher for the softball team, grew up  driving an hour to and from practice because there are no youth teams near her neighborhood.

 “I had to commute over 30 minutes to get over there instead of a five, 10-minute drive which would be in Johns Creek,” Moody said. “So, it obviously had a toll on my parents who had to make that commute for me, they had to take time out of their day, which wasn’t really fair to them.”

For younger kids, having proper softball fields enables girls to discover and explore the sport at an earlier age and practice more, often outside of school. However, the lack of fields denied current high school players of this childhood opportunity, and the resulting disparity between their level of play and opposing teams’ play is obvious. The playing levels of the few girls that played on intense travel teams when they were younger, like Moody, often stand out.

“The opportunity [to play softball] doesn’t exist here so kids don’t even get the chance to see if they like it or not until they get to high school,” Coach McDaniel, Northview’s Head Softball Coach and Athletic Director said. "We have to practice elementary type introduction stuff because all the girls that have never played before are all playing against girls that have played year-round for the past ten years." 

Moody, who has played softball for 13 years, has firsthand seen the foundation local softball programs build. Ocee Park used to have six to eight teams within each age group, but with little advertising, enrollment declined, and the city canceled the league. Now, most people in the community do not hear about softball programs. 

“The biggest issue is, if the community itself does not take that as a priority, then it will never be what we want it to be at the high school athletic level,” McDaniel said. 

To combat this, players from Northview, Johns Creek, and Chattahoochee High School attended city council meetings to stress the need for recreational teams in Johns Creek. The players publicly discussed their struggles when competing with teams who have established youth recreational teams within their communities, and their desires for future generations to have the opportunity to discover softball at a young age. 

"[The girls] getting up there and telling them [the city council] how unfortunate it is and how much they love the game and really wish they had the chance to grow up playing because of how much they love it now was amazing to me," McDaniel said. 

"I want a brand new, draw people in, ‘wow what is this’ type of field," McDaniel said. "That will draw people in and make it more important.”

Both McDaniel and Moody identify the solution as adding more softball resources to Johns Creek. However, the Chairman of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Council, Chris Jackson, says the fields are not the problem, but that the lack of teams is. 

"It's not that there are no fields - there are fields - they just happen to be utilized for other things such as baseball, " said Jackson. "The program itself lost numbers and more of an effort was put into other things at the time."

Jackson also agreed that the park directors should take action in order to encourage interest in softball in Johns Creek. He stated that the park director of Johns Creek plans to work with Ocee and Newtown Parks in order to build programs that aim to teach children ages K-5 about the game, and construct new fields at Cauley Creek, a new park currently under construction. He hopes that this will stimulate interest in softball for elementary kids.

"You don't necessarily want to have the program just for the sake of having it, you want to develop the program so it gets the kids interested because by the end of the 5th grade they can determine whether or not softball is what they want in their future and if they want to continue to not,” Jackson said. 

Additionally, they want to introduce multipurpose fields to bring attention to multiple sports with declining youth engagement.

"My vision is to be able to have girls that are coming to us that have been playing for years and we can compete with anyone," McDaniel said. "I want to go into a game knowing we have a chance."