-
Columbia’s 2013 softball team celebrates in a dogpile after defeating Pembroke Pines Charter to win the Class 6A state championship on May 12, 2013, at the Vero Beach Sports Village. (FILE)
Jimmy Williams knew he had a talented group in 2013.
Six juniors. Three sophomores. It was a core that had a chance to do something no softball team had ever done at Columbia — win a state title.
The CHS head coach actually had his eyes on the 2014 season when those six juniors would be seniors, a group that included Florida commit Kayli Kvistad, and when sophomore pitchers Erin Anderson and Ashley Shoup were a year older.
“I had told the superintendent, ‘you know, I think we might win it their senior year,’” Williams recalled of his 2014 class.
Turns out, his prediction came true a year early.
On May 12, 2013, Columbia made history. Anderson tossed most of a no-hitter that spanned two days thanks to rain to lead the Tigers to a 6-2 win over Pembroke Pines Charter for the program’s only state championship.
It sent Lake City into a state of rapture it hadn’t experienced in years — not since the football team won it all in 1967 — and hasn’t since.
Ten years ago, Lake City was finally title town again.
“It was pretty surreal,” Shoup said. “There were tears, so much excitement that you couldn’t even put into words because all of the hard work had finally paid off. We were just all so proud of each other and ourselves.”
It finished a climb to the mountaintop for a group that had its stumbles the prior two years. The Tigers came up a game short of the state Final Four in 2011 when they lost to Niceville in the regional finals, and they then took a step back the following season when they were ousted by Oakleaf in the opening round of the playoffs.
Columbia was on a redemption tour in 2013, from beating Atlantic Coast to win a district title to avenging its loss to Oakleaf in the regional semifinals to finally getting over the regional hump with a come-from-behind win over Mosley to reach the state Final Four.
Once they reached the state semifinals, there was no stopping the Tigers. Their Final Four games weren’t nearly as close as all three regional games as they defeated Lakewood Ranch 7-1 before taking down Pembroke Pines Charter.
It capped a 28-4 record, which is still a program record for wins in a season. Kvistad was named Class 6A Player of the Year. Williams was awarded the FACA Class 6A Coach of the Year. And it delivered a community a title it had been starving 46 years for.
‘Why not us?’
The 2013 season began with one goal — make it to state. Columbia had been to the playoffs in three of the four years prior and won more than 20 games in each of those four seasons, but getting through the playoffs became a hurdle. The Tigers were bounced in the opening round in 2009 and 2012, but they made their deepest run ever in 2011 when they reached the Elite 8. With seven players returning from a disappointing finish in 2012, it was time to make their deepest run yet.
Anderson: “I knew that our team was stacked with amazing talent on offense and defense, so I knew we had the potential to go far. We had power hitters, fast baserunners, quick defense and strong pitching so there was nowhere to go but up. I think our motto was ‘why not us?’ We had a banner hung in the locker room with the phrase written on it in giant letters. We were extremely confident in our abilities and practiced really hard so why would it not be us?”
Shoup: “I feel like we all kind of came out there with the same purpose and the same mindset. I can remember our motto being ‘why not us?’ that season. Thinking back on the many teams and girls (at other schools) that had achieved a state championship title in the past. If those girls can do it, then why couldn’t we?”
Holliane Dohrn, junior catcher: “Going into our junior year we knew we should have been so much better last year. We had everyone, plus some, that we needed. So we were very confident in our ability to do well. That didn’t make our expectations like, ‘oh, we’ve got to win state,’ but really we had no reason not to be successful.”
Kvistad, junior third baseman: “My expectation was always high. I wanted a state championship every year. That’s what you work for. I think that was our ultimate goal.”
Caleigh McCauley, junior outfielder: “The start of that year just felt different because of the way that we played together. Most of us had played fall ball that year together so we already had a preview of what the team would look like…I think going into it we knew that we all meshed together.”
Brandy Morgan, junior outfielder: “We were such a close knit group and we really had a special bond with each other, just the trust that we had in knowing that we had an opportunity to go all the way.”
Williams: “We had a good team there for quite a while. That group played together pretty much the whole time they were at the high school. They worked really, really hard at practice, and they had a goal. Their end goal was to win their very last game of the season and they were committed to it.”
‘We didn’t have a weakness anywhere’
The Tigers stormed out of the gate to start the season, winning their first seven games by a combined score of 77-6 with five mercy-rule victories. It was a lethal lineup that was rarely held down, with only P.K. Yonge managing to hand them three of their four losses. Led by Kvistad’s .617 batting average, Columbia hit .370 as a team, while Anderson (1.48 ERA) and Shoup (1.29 ERA) combined for 148 strikeouts. By the time the regular season was over, the Tigers were 21-4, had outscored teams 219-60, and had locked up the district’s No. 1 seed thanks to back-to-back wins over St. Augustine and Atlantic Coast in late March.
Dohrn: “You were working with a group of girls that had played together for years that were just so competitive and no one liked to lose. We hated losing more than we liked winning.”
Kvistad: “I think we just had a bunch of different types of toolsets. We had people who were meant to get on base, people that were fast, people that were meant to score. I think that’s what really makes a lineup deadly.”
Anderson: “The whole lineup from 1-9 had solid swings and we were all dedicated and hungry for wins. An offense’s greatest supporter is a solid defense and leader on the mound, and we were stacked in all three areas.”
Morgan: “I think at the early part of the season we didn’t really realize how good we were and then once we really started going it was like, ‘oh wow we really have a shot at this.’”
Williams: “We were good at every single spot. We didn’t have a weakness anywhere.”
‘She just wanted to be the best’
In addition to hitting .617 for the season, Kvistad finished with a team-high 37 RBIs and a team-high six home runs en route to winning Class 6A Player of the Year. She also tied for the team lead with 40 runs as teams tried to avoid pitching to her, including intentionally hitting her with pitches. Teammates recall all the extra time she spent at practice and on her off days working on her craft with her parents.
Dohrn: “She was never satisfied with any of the success she had. She was always going to work harder than anybody out there. It didn’t matter how much success she had, she was always going to grind every single day and never take a day off.”
Morgan: “She was just really competitive. She always wanted to go out there and compete regardless of who was out there on the field and or who was in the circle pitching. She just wanted to be the best…I attribute a lot of our success to Kayli Kvistad and her family. They often put a lot of input into additional hitting outside of just practice.
Williams: “She made everybody else good. She was there during lunch and her mom would throw to her in the cages. Sunday and Saturday she was out there. And the rest of the team just watched how she worked and how hard she worked, and they all did it too. She just made them all good.”
McCauley: “Kayli Kvistad could smack it…She had a lot of determination, and she had a lot of self-discipline. She has parents that have taught her more than you can imagine.”
Kvistad: “I definitely put in the work during offseason, after practice, before practice, things like that. I think just putting in the time makes games fun. My parents were extremely hard with me during my off days, which I think made a huge difference in the type of player you are.”
‘We had unfinished business’
Columbia easily took down Stanton Prep 11-0 in the district semifinals to clinch a playoff berth and set up a rematch with Atlantic Coast, which beat CHS 4-3 for the district title in 2012. One year later, the Tigers flipped the score with a rally. Down 3-2 in the bottom of the seventh, Morgan and McCauley reached base with a pair of singles before Morgan scored to tie the game on a hard hit ball back to the pitcher by Dohrn. McCauley then scored on a walk-off single by Lacey King.
Williams in 2013: “We felt all along that we had unfinished business with them. When Brandy got on, I knew we could tie it. Then when we tied it, I knew we were going to win it. This group just knows how to win these close games and that’s what championship teams are made of.”
McCauley: “I think that was definitely a good start to the postseason. It just gave us a little bit motivation to let us know that, hey, we can do this…That definitely helped us get over a little hump. That broke the ice a little. It was like, ‘OK, we didn’t win last year but we won this year. Let’s keep going.’”
Shoup: “That was exciting. I think that gave us a lot more confidence thinking this team may have been able to come out on top prior but we’re a good enough team to beat them, we’re a good enough team to beat anybody.”
‘They were so mean’
After surviving a close call in a 2-1 win over Middleburg in the regional quarterfinals, Columbia drew another rematch in the semis. Oakleaf visited Lake City a year after beating the Tigers 7-3 in the first round of the playoffs. But this time, the Tigers jumped out to a 3-0 lead with Anderson in the circle before she ran into trouble with two outs in the seventh inning. After Oakleaf scored a run and put runners on second and third base, Shoup came in and threw three consecutive strikes to quiet the raucous visiting crowd and send Columbia to the Elite 8.
Williams: “They filled up the bleachers on the other side like you wouldn’t believe. They had these signs and all these chants going on…it was kind of intimidating, but our group was battle tested. All that didn’t really bother them that much.”
Dohrn: “They were mean. They were so mean. They were very competitive and gave us a hard time, and it was always a good game, but their fans were just not very nice to us either.”
Kvistad: “It was definitely rewarding…just remembering the feeling of your last game and how it feels not to come out on top, you remember that the next year. So you want to do everything in your power for that feeling not to come back.”
Anderson: “I knew I could handle them on the mound, and I trusted my offense to earn the runs. When you have a team with such great talent that you can trust and they trust you and you are all working for each other and not yourself, the only thing you do is win.”
McCauley: “It was always a battle but it definitely felt good to beat them and knock them off.”
Shoup: “It just felt like all the cards were in our favor that season.”
‘It was a battle’
The Tigers’ postseason drama continued in the regional finals, only this time it wasn’t Niceville. Instead, it was Mosley, which upset Niceville 5-3 in the regional semis. Mosley was on the verge of another upset too, taking a 1-0 lead over Columbia into the sixth inning before Tatum Morgan’s bloop RBI single finally tied the game following King’s leadoff hit. Then, just as she had in the district championship game, McCauley led off the seventh inning with a double. With two outs, Brandy Morgan lined a 3-2 pitch down the third-base line to score McCauley for the winning run. Shoup’s offense finally delivered after she had pitched the final 4 2/3 innings where she kept Mosley’s offense off the board.
Dohrn: “They rolled up in some fancy bus and I was thinking, ‘OK, who do they think they are?’ Because we took a freaking school bus wherever we had to go.”
Shoup: “I can just remember it was a battle — mentally and physically. I felt like I always had my team behind me regardless of if they put the ball in play when I was pitching. I knew I had a really great fielding team behind me that was going to make the out regardless.”
Morgan: “I remember hitting a ball straight down the third base line and scoring a run to get the win in order to go to state. I just remember thinking, ‘please be fair.’ And I remember the umpire was out there pointing fair ball and I just remember being overcome with joy and excitement and running straight home to my teammates where we all celebrated.”
Williams: “Once we got past Mosley I thought we might just win this. That was the mindset of everybody then.”
‘This is our season’
By this point, nobody was stopping the Tigers. They arrived in Vero Beach believing they would bring a trophy back to Lake City. Behind five RBIs from McCauley, Columbia cruised past Lakewood Ranch 7-1. Everyone was locked in and that included an injured Dohrn, who still started behind the plate despite breaking her hand in the regional finals.
Dohrn: “Our athletic trainer at the time actually took out of a football helmet, one of the ear pieces. It looked like a donut and he just wrapped it so tight on my hand. And obviously it came with modifying it because I had to hit and then I had to catch. He essentially just made me this piece that I could just slide on to my hand. It was a lot of trial and error. Once we got that, it was the only way I could power through it. There was no not playing at that point.”
Shoup: “Going into the state tournament I think is when we kind of hit it like, ‘OK, we can actually do this. It’s all or nothing at this point.’…I can remember telling my family, ‘this is our season. I know we’ve done what it takes and we have enough girls regardless of who’s on and who’s not. We can make this possible.”
McCauley: “We didn’t skip a beat that semifinal game. It was just nothing but people coming in with a clutch hit here and there and there.”
‘It felt like a dream come true’
The only thing that could slow down Columbia was rain. The Tigers jumped out to a 3-0 lead over Pembroke Pines Charter before lightning and poor weather delayed the game in the fourth inning long enough to force a postponement until the following morning. Columbia returned to the field on Mother’s Day, where Anderson threw 6 2/3 innings of a combined no-hitter to deliver a 6-2 win and the program’s first state title. But it wasn’t without drama. Anderson and Shoup combined to walk five batters and hit another, and Pembroke Pines loaded the bases in the sixth inning to score two runs. The Tigers escaped with a double play on a fly ball to McCauley, who made a throw to Tatum Morgan on the cutoff to catch the runner heading toward third base. Anderson worked a 1-2-3 seventh inning, with the final out caught by Dohrn down the third base line as she bumped into Kvistad. After nearly 17 hours, the Tigers were champions.
McCauley: “I remember we were winning and we were on a roll. We were doing great. Then all of a sudden it’s a rain delay and we find out we’d have to wait until the next day to resume the game. That was a dagger because we had so much momentum. We were very hyped for that game so to have the rain delay was disappointing. But then the next day was Mother’s Day and we came out like we never had a rain delay.”
Anderson: “I was throwing a winning season with a very low ERA, the mound was my home. I did realize I was throwing a no-hitter, but that wasn’t important to me. Producing ground balls and easy popups that my defense could get outs with was my goal.”
Dohrn: “Looking back at (the no-hitter), obviously I understand how big of an accomplishment it was, but when you’re in it it’s just like, ‘no one’s standing in our way at this point. We can definitely do this.’”
Williams: “We worked on a play all year that only worked in the championship game, and it was a play on a fly ball to the outfielder where you throw it in and we cut it. We didn’t let it go to the plate. Well, they had bases loaded and the girls tagged up and took off for third. Well, we threw it in and we cut it and got her in a rundown between second and third and got her out.”
Morgan: “I remember it coming down to the last three outs and I was counting down because in our practices we had to play 21 outs at the end of every practice. I just remember thinking throughout the entire state championship game we’re in our 21 outs, we have three outs left, that’s it. So every time we got an out I could feel the tension and the excitement building up as we were one out closer to closing the final win of that game.”
Shoup: “It was almost like a movie where you feel like this is what we’ve been playing our whole lives for. We’ve all probably been playing since 8-and-under softball and it felt like a dream come true because it was the moment we’ve all been working so hard to get to and we were all just putting forth everything we had to win that game.”
Kvistad: “The dogpile, I remember that specifically because I was at the bottom. It was a high of all the hard work we put into the season coming together for that ultimate goal. I feel like everyone that plays a sport wants to make it the farthest that they can. Dogpiling and remembering the joy that it was that all the hard work that we put in paid off.”
‘We made our mark’
Columbia’s bid for a repeat in 2014 came up three wins short, ending with a 3-0 loss to Creekside in the regional finals. Since then, the Tigers have only been back to the regional finals once and only past the first round one other time. The 2013 squad is also the only team at the high school to reach a state championship in the last decade. While Columbia’s baseball team has reached the Final Four twice and the boys basketball team once, neither could get a victory to reach the title game. It hammers home just how difficult it is to win a championship and how truly special the 2013 softball team was. That group really was one of a kind.
Dohrn: “I think that reiterates just how hard it is to push through to that final game. Being 17 or 18 years old, you don’t realize the significance of something like that until later in your life. I’m glad that it happened, and we were able to experience it together especially with a lot of us being best friends for a long time. And those are friendships that I still have. I see them and we pick up right we were left off. I’m very grateful being able to have those memories with those girls.”
Kvistad: “That’s always going to be the first state championship we’ve ever won, which I think is so cool. It’s always going to be a part of the program, even though it’s 10 years later now. I think that legacy of being the first is really cool.”
Anderson: “We won a title that is very hard to earn. The players after us saw the 2013 6A state champions banner that was hung up on our batting cages every day, and I hope it motivated them to work as hard as we did.”
Shoup: “I feel like we really did stick to our motto that season of ‘why not us?’ I feel like we left a legacy for the community and the people playing behind us. Like if we can do it, why can’t you do it? Why can’t we have a rockstar season and why not us?”
McCauley: “We made our mark. I think that winning a state title we showed that a little small town softball team can do it. ‘Why not us?’ can be their motto every year. It’s true. It can be anybody. It can happen to anybody if you’re willing to put the work in and believe that you can do it.”