South Dakota softball community hopes sport continues fast growth

MITCHELL — Weekday nights at the Cadwell Sports Complex can get hectic during the spring and summer.

Between adult leagues, and baseball and softball practices or games at the youth levels, the 13 diamonds are all put to use, and people of all ages are scurrying about, bats on shoulders, gloves in hand.

This year, it’s been busier than ever, largely due to the growth of fast-pitch softball in Mitchell.

“Last year, there weren’t fields that were being used every day,” said Alyson Palmer, founder of the Storm softball club. “So we were like ‘oh, okay, well, if we need to have extra practice, we can go here.’

“This year, every field and every time slot was taken up when we had the field meeting.”

The growth of the sport comes at an ideal time, as softball became an SDHSAA sanctioned sport in 2023. Since then, 59 schools in the state have fielded a team.

Augustana head softball coach Gretta Melsted is a stalwart of the sport in South Dakota, having been the Vikings’ coach for 18 years, guiding the team to 11 Division II NCAA Tournaments and winning the 2019 national championship.

She’s heavily recruited the state, and has relationships with all the prominent club coaches. In fact, her assistant coach, Kelsey Thompson, runs the South Dakota Renegades softball club in Sioux Falls — one of the top clubs in the state.

While Melsted believes the addition of sanctioned softball is good for the state, she isn’t sure if its impact on the sport’s overall popularity is quantifiable yet.

“I still think it’s a little too early to tell,” Melsted said. “Because it’s only been one year. But you will see that growth and you will see that excitement for the sport now that high schools are giving young girls that opportunity. And it’s only going to make softball better in this state. We have a lot of good club teams. And that’s been what’s carried us so far. But adding high school softball makes it much more legitimate in the state.”

What is quantifiable is the number of schools playing softball. In the first year of sanctioned softball in 2023, there were 47 schools participating. That number grew by 12 schools in 2024.

Sanctioned softball has also dispelled an early concern that schools would fail to collaborate with club teams, resulting in the state’s top talent not playing for the school teams during the spring.

“From people that I’ve talked to, they said (the transition) has been pretty seamless,” Mitchell softball coach Kent Van Overschelde said. “A large majority of the girls have jumped on board with their high school teams, and I think that’s evident, especially with the top teams in the program.”

And at least one college coach in the state is in support of kids playing for their school teams in the spring.

“I love seeing kids play for their high school on top of playing club ball because there’s just something special about being able to represent the school that you go to,” Melsted said.

Van Overschelde estimated just 40 percent of the girls on the Kernels’ softball team grew up playing the sport consistently, many from the league that’s run by parks and recreation.

But with the development of more youth clubs in the area, that number may grow in the coming years.

Three years ago, Palmer realized it was difficult for many families to get their kids to the city’s youth softball summer league run by the rec center, because practices were early in the morning.

So she got together with some other parents and formed a private league that would hold practices in the evening. It was immediately popular.

“Our first year we got a hold of a few parents and we thought we’d have like 30 sign up. We had 62 sign up,” Palmer said.

This season, in year three, there are 82 girls in the club, with teams in the under-4 to under-12 divisions.

Last year, some of the older girls scrimmaged the other youth softball team in town, the Sparklers, as well as teams from Letcher, Mount Vernon and Alexandria.

However, the Storm’s main focus isn’t to bounce around from city to city playing games, but instead to become a local entity that teaches girls the fundamentals of the sport and becomes a permanent league.

“I think it’s grown a lot and we’re trying to keep it to not be such a traveling league,” Palmer said. “Our goal is to get enough girls that we can actually have a Mitchell league, like you’re going to have four to six U10 teams and have games every week.”

As a teacher at Mitchell, Palmer knows several of the girls on the Kernels’ varsity team, and is working to connect them with the younger players. These are the types of connectiions that could further bolster the high school team down the line. Several of the players have agreed to come help at practices this summer.

The next step would be building a softball training facility in Mitchell. As things stand, there aren’t any notable in-state facilities outside of Sioux Falls or Rapid City. At least one of Mitchell’s top players, Macey Linke, travels to Tea to train at The Playground, an indoor softball facility run by Tea Area coach Emmie Uitts.

According to Melsted, those types of facilities come after communities build a strong base of youth players.

“I think what you’ll see is the more that kids play softball, the more you’re going to see that happen,” she said.