Valdosta High turns to Kimberly Kelsie to revamp softball program

Published 7:15 pm Thursday, August 2, 2018

VALDOSTA — Softball has been neglected at Valdosta High for too long.

Kimberly Kelsie enters into her first season as a head coach at any level looking to reboot a Wildcats program that’s spiraled further away from relevancy in recent years.

Kelsie first began with Valdosta in 2016, moving from Madison, Fla., where she coached with varsity assistant Matthew Replogle.

As an assistant coach, Kelsie watched as the program went 0-39 over two seasons, according to MaxPreps, scoring just 100 runs while allowing 541 runs against. Now the head coach of the program, Kelsie has the opportunity to right the ship.

“I finally got the opportunity to show my work, and do what my passion is, and what I love to do,” Kelsie said at a Wildcats softball practice Wednesday.

A Lanier County graduate, Kelsie has played softball since she was 4-years-old, continuing to pursue a future in the sport at South Georgia College, where a broken leg effectively ended her playing career.

After graduating from Valdosta State University in 2013 with the goal to teach and coach softball, Kelsie caught on at Madison County before returning to the Azalea City.

But Kelsie never expected to receive a head coaching job within five years of graduation, especially at a school as prominent as Valdosta High.

“I did not expect Valdosta High School to be my first head coaching job,” Kelsie said. “I love being mentored by other people, and coach Repolgole has taught me a lot about being a head coach, but I didn’t think a 6A school would be my first position coming from two A schools.

“I’m very, very blessed for that.”

Rebuilding the Valdosta softball program will be anything but a quick fix, but Kelsie has already worked to drum up some excitement around the team.

With 25 players on the roster, the Wildcats have the ability to construct a full JV team, in addition to the varsity squad, for the first time in years. Kelsie took to football games, classrooms, hallways and lunch rooms to recruit potential players.

Still, only a handful of the Wildcats’ returning players have softball experience — an issue that must be solved at the lowest level.

“We’re trying to get our feeder program, which is the middle school program that we have, to get those girls started at a young age, to actually be better when they come up here,” Kelsie said. “So, we are starting at the bottom and working our way onto the top. Hopefully we can start holding camps and all that, so we can get more girls out here.”

Kelsie estimates 90 percent of her players are fairly new to the sport, which will require the coaching staff to be thorough in its teachings.

“We know that these girls need to start when they’re younger, but most of these girls, it’s their first time ever playing, so we’re trying to gradually get them up to par to where they’ve actually learned the game,” Kelsie said. “We still have a lot of teaching to do when it comes to these girls, but with the coaches that I have under me, they are a great group of people.”

Kelsie and Replogle, along with JV head coach Madison Deweese and JV assistant Lynn Graham, are hoping to revamp the program by practicing daily and stressing the importance of fundamentals with expectations of elevating the program to “where it needs to be” in a few years.

For Kelsie and her staff, the marker of their success won’t necessarily be found in the team’s record, but in their skill level on the diamond.

“I want to look for our kids to be more competitive; actually have knowledge of the game,” Kelsie said. “If we can get all our girls to actually focus, and have the mindset to be a team, and to be a winning program, then we’ll have that.

“But we’ve got to work together as one, and that’s what we plan on doing. We’re going to measure our growth by, even if we don’t win a game this season, by the level of skills they have.”

Valdosta softball opens its season on the road Tuesday in Nashville against Berrien at 5:30 p.m. before returning to action at 5:30 p.m. the next day in its home opener against Brooks County.

Derrick Davis is the sports editor at the Valdosta Daily Times.