Kossuth softball team wins 2020-21 division title

Kossuth High School – 2021 Division 1-3A Champions

Home Lady Aggie Grown: Influx of talent pushes Kossuth softball forward

2021 Lady Aggie team wins the Division 1-3A title in one of the toughest divisions in the state

By TANNER MARLAR

For Crossroads Magazine

Division 1-3A softball is not for the faint of heart.

Year in and year out it hosts some of the best play across the state, and the Kossuth Aggie softball team is an instrumental part of that heightened level of competition.

One of the driving forces for this level of competition in Aggieland was started with the current assistant coach Carleigh Mills back when she donned the Maroon and White. Mills went on to have a successful collegiate softball career and has now happily returned home to help her players hopefully do the same.

“It’s awesome,” Mills said of coming back to coach her home team. “It’s always good to come back and see your hometown and home team and just see how much it’s grown just in the five, six years I’ve been gone.”

Mills was part of the coaching staff that led to the Aggies winning the Division 1-3A championship during the 2021 season, and now, knee deep in division play once again, is excited to have the exact same roster as last year with a few extra pieces.

KHS had no seniors last season, meaning that every single member of the division championship winning team has come back for more, and Mills and the rest of the team were excited to hit the ground running.

“We’re just building off what we had from last year and getting better. I mean, it’s big getting to have those kids (back) with Brandon Bobo (current head coach) in his first year. But with me, I’m getting to see some of these kids have grown just within a year and how hard they’ve worked. It’s big when you can get that many kids back,” Mills explained.

An influx of talent has spurred life into the KHS softball program, and according to Mills, it’s all been about how the community as a whole has bought into softball at a young age. More girls are playing travel softball than ever before, and that’s given them a chance to not only be more skilled as an individual, but also to be able to work together as a team.

“You get to learn who you’re playing with,” said Mills. “You get to learn kind of how the person next to you plays or the person behind you plays.”

Some of the upperclassmen on the team have been playing together for years, long before they put on an Aggie jersey, and it shows in the on-field product.

“You know when somebody is throwing this pitch, and because of that you get a sense of where the ball’s going to go so you can set up. You just learn their abilities and tendencies much sooner,” Mills added.

That talent has aided in the Aggies’ ability to deal with the fierce amount of competition within their division, and with the youth the squad has, they’re not done yet.

The 2021 3A state champion came out of the same division, and it wasn’t the Aggies. It was rival Booneville. This year, they’re out to take what they believe is theirs.

“They’ve got some payback coming,” Mills said of the rest of division 1-3A.

The Aggies softball team is hungry. They want to join that upper echelon of women’s sports in Alcorn County, and they know they have the right mix of youth, experience and talent to get the job done.

Their quest for a state title began last year, and in 2022, if softball fans were to ask them, they’ve got plenty of unfinished business in which to attend.