There are five states that play their high school softball in the fall including Colorado, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma and Georgia which is arguably the most significant of these states. 

Line Drive Softball has launched a 12-week series covering prep play in the Peach State led by Steve Hickey under the title of Road to Columbus, tracking the pathway to the state championships in Columbus, Ga.

Here’s our second of the series which today reviews the history of how fastpitch in Georgia became the powerful force in the sport it is today…

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Working the Field

After many years of head-to-head competition, I had the opportunity to sit down with long-time rival, Coach Donnie Byrom, to see what makes his program one of the best in the state of Georgia. 

Coach Byrom backed up Prince Avenue’s first ever Georgia State Championship in 2023 with another third-place finish in 2024.  

We met after a rain recently, and he was preparing to work his field.

An interesting comparison, high school football coaches and basketball coaches don’t have to prepare the playing surface before every game and practice for varsity and junior varsity teams. 

I am struck by the comparison of softball coaches being farmers of players—always tilling the soil, encouraging growth, preparing for storms, recovering from storms, and trying to harvest a bumper crop… 

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How It Started 

Coach Byrom joined Prince in 2019 after a quick and restless chapter of retirement from East Jackson.

He has been Head Coach for over 23 years and boasts three state championships at three different schools. Byrom is currently GHSA’s 9^th winningest active coach with over 468 wins.

He is still feisty, he has a memory like a steel trap, recounting plays from five years ago, and is still not a friend to losing. He has much to share.   

With that type of expertise, he is a good first person for me to ask the question:

“How do you spell Columbus?” 

His start at Prince Avenue required choices: to say “yes,” he had to say “no.”

The long-time basketball coach had to negotiate with his wife, Joanna, to leave that sport behind.

Next, he had to steady the ship, multiple coaching changes over the past 3 years, had made players and families weary.  

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A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats 

Coach Byrum looked into the program and sought out players in the pipeline and tried to retain them. His priority was Kam Caldwell. She was the shortstop who could hold everything together and would later go to Appalachian State and Georgia College and State.

As the coach kept looking, he found a future star in eighth grader Audrey Vandagriff. The problem was she was not going to focus on softball and take a season off to do cross country.

More importantly, her non-negotiable was that she did not want to pitch… ever again. 

So, Byrum had to address a familiar challenge: upper-class girls that were not going to play in college began receding and stopped off-season work. 

Still, he somehow kept senior Taylor Bond pitching for her senior year and made an oath to Audrey about bringing in a sixth-grade pitcher, Kylee Simmons (Class of 2026) and that promise meant Audrey would never have to step in the circle again. 

Reflecting on Audrey, she established a high bar.

From that first meeting, she completely bought in and, as an elite athlete from Day 1, Coach Byrom saw the elite competitor emerge in the eighth grade after she trucked a girl who was just trying to back up first base.

As the dust settled and Byrom hustled over to make sure everyone was good, Audrey helped the second baseman up. Quietly, she turned and asked, “I’m safe right?”  

Throughout her career, her character and leadership outweighed her God-given talent. Vandagriff was the complete package and there never was a moment when she did not answer what the team needed.  

That was the foundation. Prince Avenue has a built-in advantage from most schools and all it must do is retain its own players.

From there, all they did was play and develop… and they did both very well. 

As a result, in a crowded Elite Eight of titans, Prince Avenue raised the State Championship trophy in the Fall of 2023 and Donnie Byrom had guided them to their first ever softball championship. 

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Balancing High School Play & Travel Ball

In Georgia, travel ball and high school softball have found a lot of common ground. Byrom says:

“There are great travel coaches just as there are great high school coaches. I have never been prickly unless they are feeding the player misinformation. We want our kids to play travel at the highest level they can enjoy. All that we ask is that come July 31 we are the priority.”  

The coach says he respects the other side of the softball world and realizes that he must work together with the travel and clinic coaches to manage the workload of the players and keep them healthy and primed for October. 

Understanding how important it is to the girls to prioritize their travel ball commitments in the summer months, even at the expense of school workouts, is critical to keeping the highest-level players in your school program.  

In season, team bonding is a focus. An overlooked cultural dimension, but an incredibly important one, is the team mandated ride home on the bus after all games. Byrom thinks his players need time together to decompress and eat and process their games together.

Frankly, is there a better place on Earth than a winning bus ride home? And on the flip side, is there a better place to process a loss? 

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How Do You Spell “Columbus?” 

As my discussion with Coach Byrom turned to the host site for all eight classifications of the “Elite 8,” he laid out his scheduling priorities during the season to get ready for Columbus.  

“Columbus is the goal of every softball program in the state of Georgia,” he said.  “There are a lot of tournaments across the country, but Columbus is special.”   

Byrom pointed out, that getting there, it’s not a destination, it’s a journey. 

“You cannot spell Columbus, without ‘BUS,’” he added.  “It’s all about how you get there.” 

Georgia has re-introduced the Power Rating system, and its application to seeding the playoffs has coaches scrambling. 

It is based on an intricate system of awarding points based on wins and losses, and your direct opponent’s wins and losses.  There is a magnification of away wins and a discount of home wins. 

In short, no one knows what the final seeds into post play will be until they are published for the last time in early October.  The famous softball fan, Mark Twain, once commented,

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” 

No doubt he was thinking of Gamechanger and the GHSA Power Rating when he said that. 

Byrom discussed the levels of scheduling.

“To start, we want to play all 30 games,” he began. “We want to see live pitching.  We will play anyone and anywhere.” 

That approach worked for a minute, when his program was on the come.  Now, coaches still take his calls, but it’s getting harder to find competition he says.

“We get told no way too much,” Byrom admits. “You won’t find a team that wants to play as everyone tries to protect their power ranking.  Coaches at the big schools like to schedule hard as well, but when you run rule them, they won’t invite you back.”

“So, you take what you can get, and other non-region schools will come play you, but oftentimes it’s like clubbing baby seals.  Then those teams won’t take your call next year.” 

After just brushing up about South Commons Softball Complex, the host site of the Elite 8’s in Columbus, Byrom cannot withhold his attachment to that special place.

“Wow!” he exclaims. “It’s the best of the best. It’s the exclamation point on a long, hard-fought process that says your program is successful. Kids get to see their travel ball buddies that’s teams made it. It can be overwhelming.”    

The coach has been doing it long enough that the spectacle has grown from a perfunctory two-day shootout to the envy of the country in its current four-day double elimination bracket play.  

Byrom believes:

“Being in Elite 8 is to me the most fun in coaching across all sports in Georgia. Even the umpires compete for the opportunity to go work those games.”  

Entire coaching staffs from colleges across the country also descend on the area at that time of the year. It’s fun to look at the color brigade of colleges coming and going and sitting on your game. 

Some coaches like being discrete, sitting along one of the foul lines, quietly taking notes. 

Some coaches like sitting behind the backstop, in full regalia and full view of the pitcher, eating a sandwich, just cooking players to see how they respond to recruiting pressure on top of competing for a state championship. 

College coaches love it because the kids are really fighting for something that means so much more than a trophy at the end of a weekend tournament.  

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Time Stood Still 

Looking back on all the trips and all the memories, with three state championships under his belt, Byrom settles on a time that was a near miss. Like many of us, it started for him with daddy ball and his “why” was his daughter.

“Kayla was a senior,” he recalls. “She had pitched every inning of every game and had just carried us to crucial victory after victory. In the semi-finals, bottom of last inning, we were losing 2-1.”

“We had a runner on first and she comes up. Hitting was not her thing, but she got ahold of one and hit a ball that looked like a home run. Just whack! Her best contact ever.”

“But the outfield was already pushed back and the centerfielder catches the ball before it could clear the temporary fence. She just pulled that home run back. My daughter collapsed half-way to second. Ball game. I can still see that today. It just was not meant to be.”   

I think we all can relate. But, for him, that is how it started. And how is it going now?  

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Early Season In-Sight – How This Fall Looks? 

There is a quiet confidence in Coach Byrom’s eye when he talks about the 2025 campaign.

He graduated three seniors from last year’s team and has another precocious freshman in the lineup.

“It’s a different team now than what we have brought to Columbus before. I am not going to hand out a scouting report, but we can hit 1-through-10. We can defend with anyone. We are truly a team you cannot pitch around anyone. These girls have been to Columbus and won. The five seniors are locked in.”    

His concern is how the post season rolls out. There are not enough teams to fill the 64 slots in the state tournament at the “private” level, so everyone effectively gets a week off for a bye. 

Certain teams even get a second week bye, and the coach’s concerns are that they will sit forever. That cooled the bats off last year.  

Some old rivals loom on the Columbus horizon… which is no surprise, “

“The Road to Columbus” runs through Wesleyan, a dynasty in its own right as a five-time defending state champion. 

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A League of Their Own 

GHSA moved 23 softball teams into a “Private” classification to settle the championship last year, effectively removing them from 1A, 2A, and 3A competition.

The results were spectacular.

The Elite 8 for Private play had two defending champions from 2023—Wesleyan and Prince—and two runners-up in Mount Vernon and Hebron Christian in the final eight.

Specific to the “Private” category, Byrom thinks that softball has been caught in the middle of a power struggle about football. Unfortunately, it is based on an easy conspiracy theory that private schools are better because they recruit.  

Georgia is not the first state to wrestle with these concepts and nor is there a proven path to normalize the equity of competition.

Byrom contends:

“It’s not about recruiting and money, it’s about vision and priorities. There are plenty of schools with time and resources that are just not good. I have zero dollars for recruiting or scholarships.”   

If Prince recruited, it is scary to think about what Kendall Wells, a 2025 Oklahoma signee, would have accomplished as a Wolverine as she lived just five minutes from campus.

Simply, the coach concludes:

“We are better at Prince because 90 percent of my players will hit year-round.” 

It would have been a better Columbus tournament to see Gordon Lee, Morgan County, and Heritage, Catoosa play against everyone, and many feel it is silly to pull out private schools. 

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Can You Handle the Heat? 

Unlike club national tournaments, such as the PGF Nationals that offers multiple berth opportunities to qualify, Columbus has only one road to get there.

Regardless of Power Rankings, separate classifications, or the best efforts of your rivals, it takes what it takes.  

Coach Byrom wants to guard the experience of Columbus.  Costs are rising for families to attend, and the bracket scheduling seems to fundamentally change every few years. 

“I love the extra week of competition in October we got a few years back,” he continues. “I actually liked the Super-Regionals we did for a few years.”  

He is referring to a four-team double elimination tournament to get to the Elite 8.  That was successful format that the backers gave up on too quickly, he believes.  

There is an elaborate opening ceremony in the big stadium, but he believes it needs to be the night before.  Currently, it is right before first pitch of the first games, and it is not unusual to see pitchers and catchers racing across the venue trying to get warm as games commence. 

As our time drew to an end, we both still had much more to share, but he left this closing thought:

“Softball’s Elite 8 is the pinnacle of all GHSA sports.  I will see you there.” 

You can count on it, Coach!

— Steve Hickey for Line Drive Softball