Varsity Kansas - The Blog

by joanna
Summer softball news (my continuing way to keep this blog alive until the fall high school sports season)

Spoke with Chuck Schrader, the Clearwater softball coach who heads up the Kansas Renegade.
The Renegade had three teams last year, a 14-under, 16-under and an 18 gold team. It now has seven teams, including two 18a teams and that 18 gold team.

“I’m a little bit involved with all those teams and I’ve got two guys that are heavily-involved assistants with the gold team (Steve Rorebeck, Rick Kluge).”
Here are some of the players on the gold team — SS/2B Sammie Shook (Derby), 3B/P Jen Heerey (All-Metro) (Goddard), 1B Amanda Kirk-hart (Goddard), C/3B/2B Ashton Rorebeck (Goddard), OF/3B Kaitlin Martin (Andale), 2B/OF Kaity Riffel (Maize), OF Cortney Harp (Northwest), OF/2B/C Kayla Bontrager (NW), P Brittany Norris (Emporia State), C Jacque Horejsi (Butler Community College).
On his other teams he also has Karley Schmelzer, a two-time All-Metro pitcher from Andale and three from Clearwater, including All-Metro utility Tricia Vogel.
“We had so many kids at the high school level come to the tryout, that we found what we were needing for that gold team. But we had so many good players, that we put together an 18a team. Then we had 20 more kids, so another 18a squad. It’s really been fun. It’s taxing me to the limit to help all these coaches.
“æ.æ.æ. What we’re trying to do is get these kids out and playing and get the best expo-sure we can get them.
“æ.æ.æ. We have to travel to get the college coaches to see them. They’re not going to come here to some b, c level tournament to judge talent. They want to see them against the best level.”
Five Renegade teams will be playing at the Heartland tournament this weekend in Blue Springs, Mo.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 2:16 p.m. and is filed under Softball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.