Anna’s Focus – HISTORY MAKER: Player knows her role – By Mac Banks Fort Mill Times – (Published February 27, 2008

Anna’s Focus
HISTORY MAKER: Player knows her role
By Mac Banks Fort Mill Times
Published February 27, 2008

For Anna Kimbrell, baseball is baseball, no matter what gender you are.

Kimbrell, 17, is poised to make history this year as the first female to play varsity baseball at the high school level in the state of South Carolina, according to the state High School League. “The Fort Mill area usually has good baseball teams,” said Roger Hazel, assistant commissioner over baseball with the high school league. “So she must be a darn good player to make the team. I’m not aware of this happening before for us. This is new ground. We haven’t run across this before.”

But for Kimbrell, a pitcher and a catcher, this is nothing new. She has been proving people wrong about girls playing baseball ever since she was a tot. The Nation Ford High junior started playing baseball when she was 4. “It comes natural to me,” she said. “I don’t know. I really get into the game. I know it could be boring to watch, but when I am playing, I have so much fun.”

Kimbrell recently returned from Hong Kong, where she played in an all-female baseball tournament and has played in both female and male leagues while growing up. Playing against females is somewhat more difficult, she says, simply for the fact of the timing changes between playing against boys and playing against girls.”It’s a different style of baseball,” Kimbrell said. “It’s hard to adjust to their (females) style of pitching. For the most part, the guys still throw five to seven mph faster on average and they are all throwing the same thing. Baseball is still baseball.”

She has heard all the talk and questions of, “why don’t you switch to softball?” For her, softball has never been an interest. “I never played it,” Kimbrell said of softball. “I don’t really want to. I have always played with the boys.” Despite never playing softball, she has already had offers from three Division I schools for softball scholarships — including the University of Alabama. But baseball isn’t the only sport she participates in. Kimbrell has also be contacted by the Air Force Academy about going there to participate in another sport in which she excels – swimming.

She has a stock reply when asked about switching to softball: “I usually tell them, ‘Not right now. I just have to see what the future holds,'” she said. Kimbrell admits it does get frustrating at times that people expect her to switch to softball, just because she is a girl.

“It becomes something you hear all the time, but there are girls that play college baseball,” she said.

And for Kimbrell, playing college baseball is what she wants to do. Kimbrell knows there are nay sayers out there. The jeers she has heard all her life, especially since she is a girl in a male dominated sport. “There isn’t much I haven’t heard,” she said. “Now I just laugh about it. It just adds fuel to the fire. My parents told me if you want to hang with the guys you are going to have to deal with it, so from like 11 or 12 on, I have blocked it out. I have learn to let go of a lot of stuff.”

Kimbrell said she is proud to make history and hopes that other young women have the courage to follow in her footsteps. But the road for Kimbrell has been easier than for other female players who have had to resort to litigation just to play. She said the town, her peers, teammates and coaches have always looked out for her. “It’s been great,” she said. “This town has been good to me. It’s always good to have a team stick up for you when they have too.”

A Fort Mill native, Kimbrell said she is still getting used to wearing black and red and had always expected to wear the blue and gold of Fort Mill. “Just coming to a new school has been a hard transition,” she said. Kimbrell first went out for high school baseball in the seventh grade, when she attempted to make the JV baseball team at Fort Mill High. She made the first cut, but was eventually let go. She came back the next year and made the JV team as an eighth grader and played the past three years on the JV team at Fort Mill.

“High school ball has been a pretty good experience for me,” she said. “I never wanted to think that just because I was on the team last year, I’m going to make it this year.”

Now she is at Nation Ford and went through tryouts the same as she’s always done.

Every year, she felt she had something to prove, not just making the team, but to show that she deserved to be there. This year was no exception. “The bottom line is we are going off what their capabilities are,” said Del Corley, Nation Ford’s head coach. “She is good enough to make the varsity. I haven’t treated her situation any different than any other one. She always does what we ask her to do. Her ability to pitch is a plus for us and that is a big plus for Anna.”Corley said Kimbrell will be pitching for Nation Ford and possibly catching some games. For her, just having the opportunity is all she wants.