Lauren Holifield already is an accomplished softball player.
But adjustments have to be made when you have grown up as a fast-pitch player first and you try to translate those skills to the slow-pitch game.
Thanks to some helpful pointers from Wade Beard, Holifield has figured out what she needs to do to be just as strong a hitter in slow pitch as she is in fast pitch.
“I think it is helping me a lot because the ball is going a lot harder and a lot further than it did before he started working with me,” said Holifield, a sophomore second baseman on the New Hope High School slow-pitch softball team.
Holifield and the rest of the New Hope High School softball team will try to break out a different kind of power stroke at 11 a.m. Saturday when they take on Picayune in the best-of-three Mississippi High School Activities Association Class 5A state championship at the V.A. Fields in Jackson.
New Hope (22-4) will try to win its fourth consecutive state title, and its 13th overall. Last year, New Hope beat Brookhaven for its first championship in Class 5A.
This year, the Lady Trojans have used a balanced attack that has featured contributions from all classes — from seniors Haley Tutor, Anna Holley, Brandi and Brittney Brantley, and Jessica Moore to sophomores like Holifield.
The contributions have extended to Beard, who is the husband of New Hope coach Tabitha Beard. In addition to driving the bus, tending to the field, and his other duties, Beard also pitches batting practice for the Lady Trojans. On Wednesdays, he works with the team and with assistant coach Connie Harris, Holifield”s mother, while his wife cooks dinner for the entire group.
The first night Tabitha Beard went home to cook, she waited and waited and waited for her husband to come home. When she finally came out to the field, she found her husband still with Holifield, who was on her fifth bucket of balls. The adjustment Wade Beard suggested Holifield make — to use her feet to move forward in the batter”s box so she could get her weight behind her swing — proved immediate dividends.
“It just came to me,” Holifield said. “It was like, ”Oh, that is how you do it.” It feels right.”
Tabitha Beard said Holifield isn”t like other softball players who change their swing from fast pitch to slow pitch. She said Holifield remains a hands-to-the-ball hitter who used to get a lot of hits off her hands when she played slow-pitch ball. She saw a reversal of that after Holifield worked with her husband, or “Mr Wade” as he is affectionately known to the players.
“My husband is amazing,” Beard said. “He is the man. My husband loves these girls as much as I do. He just kept pitching and pitching that first night and Lauren was like, ”Coach, come here watch this.” She was moving the ball and she was doing it well. He had made some minor adjustments with her feet in the box. I have to give him a lot of credit for that.
“I think the biggest improvement has come at the plate. She is one of those who steps to the plate you know something is good going to happen.”
Beard also feels Holifield has matured in that she knows which pitches to look for to maximize her power stroke. She also has been a fixture at second base as part of the Lady Trojans” defense, which ranks with the top teams in the state.
Holifield flexed her muscles Tuesday in a sweep of Pearl in the North Half final. In game two, Holifield smacked a home run off the top of right-center field fence. She has shown power to all fields this season, but she and her teammates will have to be careful not to swing for the fences at the V.A. Fields, which are as deep as 300 or more feet, much longer than any fields the teams play on in the regular season.
But New Hope showed Tuesday it might be ready. All of the team”s starters had hits in both games against Pearl to sweep it into another championship series.
Holifield hopes her power stroke will help push the Lady Trojans to another title.
“I wasn”t getting as much power because my whole weight wasn”t going into the ball,” Holifield said. “Now it is going and going.”
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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