When Swan Valley softball head coach Tom Kennelly was recently asked to put reaching his 1000th career win in perspective, it took him aback.
“I’ve been at this quite awhile,” he said. “35 years… I’ve had some awfully good girls that have played for me from the beginning. A lot of the girls, I’ve coached their mothers. They like softball, and they keep playing for me, so I’m pretty fortunate.”
After playing for fast-pitch teams in his early 20s, Kennellly became the second head coach of the Viking softball program in 1980, taking over for Mike Hanley. Since that time, it’s been success after success, even winning the class B state championship in 1986.
“We’ve been to state semifinals and finals eight times, but we’ve only won it once,” Kennelly said. “Plus, one of my best teams I ever had never made it to the state finals… We were 42-0 and lost 1-0 in districts. Another year we lost to Freeland 2-1 in districts by giving up two runs in the seventh, and they went on to win it all. A lot of times it takes a little luck to get down there and win it.”
The Vikings have been rolling in recent years, having been state runners up each of the last two campaigns and making it to the semifinals three years ago.
This year’s squad is off to a 20-7-1 start, but Kennelly knows as well as anyone that another trip to state is far from certain.
“Maybe we can, but it’s a really tough district,” he said. “We play Mt. Pleasant in the pre-district, and if we win, we meet Bullock Creek in the first game of the district, and they beat us twice this year; they’ll probably win our conference this year. Four of the last five years someone from our district has ended up in the final four.”
He may have been at it for more than 30 years, but Kennelly finds it hard to think about stepping away from coaching any time soon. With the talent-laden teams he fields year after year, it’s hard to blame him.
“There’s quite a few good kids coming up in eighth and ninth grade,” he said. “There’s good fourth and fifth graders, too. I don’t know if I will stay around that long, but it seems like there’s kids that like softball [in every grade]. We work on pitching quite a bit, we have second and third graders that come in and pitch twice a week. In fast-pitch, the name of the game is pitching.”
Pitching may be the name of the game, but a good support group doesn’t hurt either.
“I’ve had good kids and really good assistant coaches,” Kennelly said. “You don’t have a great class every year, but you have enough of them to remain competitive… I’ve had 10 pitchers go on to pitch in college… The combination of those things I think has given me pretty good players with pretty good coaches, so I’ve been pretty fortunate in that regard.”