Lee Kicklighter wanted to see some good Henry County softball players in a spring game, so he went down to Gordon State College a couple of weeks ago and found plenty of them.

Having completed his first year as head softball coach at Ola High School (softball is a fall sport for high schools in Georgia), and with five years as Union Grove’s skipper also on his resume, Kicklighter knows as well as anyone how big the sport is here. Five Georgia High School Association state championships in the past nine years have been won by county schools:  Union Grove in 2012, Ola in 2013, and Locust Grove with a three-peat in 2017-2019. All of those were in the AAAAA classification. Eagle’s Landing Christian Academy won three Class A Private state titles from 2013 to 2015.

Locust Grove, Ola and Union Grove are now all represented on the Gordon State squad. There are five of them in all: Jordyn Dobson, sophomore, Union Grove; Abby Foster, freshman, Ola; Taylor McClendon, sophomore, Ola; Chandler Mitchell, freshman, Locust Grove; Camden Steele, freshman, Union Grove.

“There is a deep history of softball in Henry County,” said Kicklighter, who coached Union Grove from 2013 to 2017 and then spent two years in Houston County before coming to Ola. “I thought it was cool that five girls from Henry County are on the same team in college, and they’ve been in some big softball games.”

All five were on the All-Region first team at some point during their high school careers and are getting significant playing time at Gordon, he added.

Youth softball is an interesting sorority of sorts. Many players spend their summers on elite travel teams and in other non-scholastic programs, which means that high school teammates play against each other at those times and vice versa. Many friendships are formed that transcend a single team, and top players become very familiar with each other as they move up the ranks.

Additionally, the coaches at these county schools are well acquainted with each other, and each coach knows a great deal about the opposing players. This is in part because during those state championship runs mentioned earlier, all three schools were in the same region and there were quite a few key games in the regular season and playoffs involving county rivals.

As for the most recent high school season, Kicklighter considers is a major victory that all of his team’s games were played amid the various COVID-19 adjustments that the school district made.

“We were fortunate to play a complete season,” he said. “We had some exposures here and there, but we did it.”