Cache girls complete solid season

In recent years area youth programs are starting to find experienced coaches willing to invest the time and effort into building stronger teams and the Cache Lady Dawgs 8U coach-pitch team is one of those that is showing the benefits of good coaching after the club finished sixth recently in the OK Kids 8U coach-pitch state tournament.

Josh Dawson played his high school ball at Eisenhower and then had a good career playing for Cameron University, earning NCAA Division II All-American honors as a junior. Now he’s coaching girls softball and trying to keep the feeder program for Cache High School going strong.

“We put this bunch of girls together last year and we won the 2023 spring and summer season titles and this year we played in the Fletcher league and won that title and that gave us a spot in the OK Kids State Tournament,” Dawson said. “We just want to keep giving these girls solid fundamental skills and keep them playing together. In our league we won 12 games and outscored our opponents 143-15 over that span.”

Moving up to 10U is always a challenge as the girls go from coach-pitch to player-pitch and that means developing pitching depth becomes very important.

“We have several girls who have already been working with good pitching coaches and that transition is very important,” Dawson said. “We have one girl who is developing well and we just have to keep working with the others. We have been able to use the Eisenhower High School field with artificial turf and that has been another important factor by having a field to practice on regardless of whether we’ve had rain or not.”

Dawson gets help coaching from brother Dawson and Keith Powell, another good player who played for Eisenhower as well.

“We have girls who have grown up around softball and baseball and they know the game,” Josh Dawson said. Dawson’s daughter Aubrey is on the team along with Powell’s daughter Olivia. “Doug Stephens is another former Cameron player and his daughter is on this team. Cache has been to State this past school year in both fast-pitch and slow-pitch and Coach (Miles) Smith has a good group of returning players and we just want to keep sending these younger players up to that level with strong fundamentals to keep growing the program.”