Centenary Champions
Submitted by Micah (Rhodes) McKinnon ’07
The year 2004 was an incredible year for Centenary softball. I was just a naive freshman at the time, but much of the magic in that team rested on a few different things. We were matched up with some big dogs that year and were even successful against some of them—Florida included. Also, we had nine seniors on that team, all of them incredible leaders and many of whom were (and still are) from local areas surrounding Shreveport.
By 2002, a new coach arrived to revitalize the energy. And by May of 2004, exams were finished, the campus had cleared, and we were still playing ball. The fact that these nine seniors were local really kept that team alive in the end. None of them were exhausted, homesick or ready to go home because they WERE home. When underdog Centenary shocked everyone and won our conference tournament against talented and scrappy Western Illinois University, on their turf, we were on cloud 9. I remember toward the end of that long bus ride home that Coach Montgomery had the bus driver pull over at the old Bennigan’s in Bossier so we could catch the regional team announcements on ESPN and find out who we’d play the next week.
Regionals would be 64 teams, 8 sites, and we were one of them. It was absolutely surreal because Centenary softball had never been this successful. We had the channel changed at the bar as soon as we walked in. Twenty of us piled into this little, tiny sports bar waiting to hear the results. All of a sudden, the name Centenary College pops up on the screen—that was a shock to see in itself. We were listed as seed 64 of course—as student athletes from tiny Centenary, we always felt the weight of being underdog. This number meant that we were identified as the smallest threat in all 64 teams that had made it.
The announcer said, “In game one, Centenary College will play…. University of Arizona.”
At the time, Arizona had housed the number one softball team in the country. Their coach had been the Olympic softball coach. To us, this felt like The Tortoise and The Hare or David and Goliath. We were Rudy. We were Hoosiers. We were Rocky Balboa. The list goes on.
After the announcement, there was a brief yet deafening silence before a simultaneous uproar of excited cheers filled the room. Time stood still. That Bennigan’s had never seen so much excitement.
In that moment, we really felt the intensity of just being excited to be there. It was an incredible time and I’ll never forget that moment. With both our starting third baseman and cleanup hitter down, we went on to nearly beat them in that game. We were up by one run in the 6th inning. A home run tipped them over the edge in the end, but there was lots of Louisiana pride that day—the ULL softball team happened to be at the same site we were and were sitting in the stands cheering their heads off for us during that game. Boy, it was fun. Our season ended there in Tucson, but the memory of that year is alive and well.
We reached the Gold Dome on our charter bus after the tournament was over and with tears in my eyes I waved goodbye to those seniors, realizing it would probably be the last time I’d get to see most of them. I will never, ever forget the matchless leadership of them that year. They had faced so much adversity, and it was such a beautiful time to see them all reap the benefits of such hard work and hope. I really understood and felt the weight of what we had all experienced together and tried to photograph that memory in my mind as it was happening. I wanted it to last forever. But like all good things, they come to an end, and this memory wouldn’t be nearly as precious if it hadn’t ended that day at the Gold Dome. Centenary pride had never been so high.
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