Some teams need years to find their groove. The Wheat Ridge Eagles found theirs in their very first season, and it happened at exactly the right moment.
The Eagles are Wheat Ridge’s 10U team in the Girls’ Softball League of Jefferson County (GSLJC), a program with roots going back to 1952. Wheat Ridge Girls’ Softball Association was one of the founding pieces of that league, started by a small group of locals who wanted girls to have the same shot at organized ball that boys already had. The girls’ softball league was the first of its kind in the country and groundbreaking enough at the time to land a spot on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club in the mid-1950s. Today the GSLJC spans eight age divisions and 61 teams across Wheat Ridge, Arvada, Golden, Lakewood and South Jeffco, with ten of those teams calling Wheat Ridge home.
Submitted photo
As a brand-new team going up against squads that had been playing together for years, the Eagles closed their regular season 7-5, a record head coach David Hampson calls an accomplishment on its own. Then came the tournament. The girls caught fire at just the right time and ran the table undefeated. In the third game, pitcher Brooklyn Mohr threw a no-hitter. Hampson, who’s been coaching in Wheat Ridge for 21 years, says he’s never seen a performance like it.
But ask Hampson what the season was really about, and wins aren’t where he starts. “Make it safe, make it fun and make it memorable” is the team’s stated goal, and everything else follows from there. There are no team captains, because every player is treated as essential. There’s no tryout to make the roster either. This is a recreational program: you sign up, you play, and skill levels run the gamut. The job of the coaching staff is to make sure every girl leaves practice a little better than she showed up.
That staff includes head coach David Hampson; head assistant coach Nadia Vieira, one of Hampson’s former players who keeps the girls hustling and on task, assistant coach Jeff Mohr, who’s brought a strong hand for pitching and hitting instruction in his first year, and assistant coach Breanna Infante, a former competitive player who works with catchers and has a gift for connecting with the kids. Rounding out the group are team mom, Cherokee, who keeps parents in the loop, and scorekeepers Antony and Mike, who track the stats that help Hampson make decisions.
New players are folded in fast. At their first practice, they’re introduced to the team during warm-ups, and veteran players often take newcomers under their wing without being asked. Before every game, the team gathers in a cheer circle to get fired up. Positions on the field are earned through ability, effort and attitude, and coach Hampson makes clear that any one of those three can also cost a player playing time.
Celebrations happen often and for all kinds of reasons: a first hit, a diving catch, a hustle play, good sportsmanship. Sometimes practice ends early for ice cream. On rained-out days, the team has gone bowling instead. Hampson believes team spirit is the real engine behind everything else. If the girls are having fun, they keep coming back. If they keep coming back, they improve.
There’s even a mascot. Blaze, the stuffed eagle, rotates homes with a different player every couple of weeks for photo ops, and he even has his own website!
Watch for the Eagles this fall as their season kicks off in September, a shorter run built to prepare new and returning players for next spring’s push.
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