After a vicious first loss to Hebron, the Cowgirls’ second game against the Hawks was a test in resilience.

Giving the team an early lead, Coppell junior pitcher Kat Miller led the team to its 8-5 success with an easy capture of a bunt from the air and a quick throw to first base, getting the Cowgirls a double play and Miller one of her proudest moments in the season.

“As a pitcher, when you’re on the mound and everyone is looking to you to lead whether you want that role or not, that’s what you are,” Coppell coach Mike Dyson said. “What Kat does is not show the emotion of defeat, she just keeps going. I’ve had a lot of pitchers in the past 27 years that after seven innings they’re done, sore and sore, and Kat’s not that way. It’s more that she pitches, the better she becomes.” 

Although Coppell’s season ended without a playoff run, Miller already plans to lead her team into the next season after the bitter ending to her first completed season as Coppell’s starting pitcher. 

“This high school season has been the most painful of them all because we had so much talent; we just didn’t have the mindset going into some of those games,” Miller said. “When you see others down on themselves, thinking ‘we’re going lose this game’ when we haven’t lost it yet, that’s my biggest ouch. We have a lot of girls on our team playing select and all of the off season through the fall, so we are going to be grinding to go to the playoffs.”

Spending her freshman year as JV’s pitcher, beating out several upperclassmen for the spot, Miller was set to be varsity starting pitcher her sophomore year when COVID-19 hit. Miller pitched only one game against Irving MacArthur. With Texas Glory over the summer, Miller prepared further to breakout as a pitcher and leader in the 2021 season.

“Every softball player starts out wanting to pitch and as time goes on, you see people stop pitching because it’s so much time and work,” Coppell senior first baseman Michaella Baker said. “Kat was willing to put that in – she doesn’t let anything little affect her performance and keeps working towards being the best. She changes the mood when we’re struggling, just says one thing and we’re all starting to laugh because that’s just her personality. I just remember Kat as being the silly one, always cracking jokes and making us laugh.”

Miller began to play softball after Baker introduced it to her at Discover and Share Daycare when they were five years old. Baker pitched for the Cowgirls last year, switching to play more of first baseman to align with her future position at Odessa College. Graduating Baker along with six other seniors leaves an opening for leadership on the team, a position innately tied into her position as pitcher and fueled by her optimism.

“Softball means just fighting for your teammates,” Miller said. “You’re fighting for yourself and you have to do your own job but at the end of the day, you’re fighting for everyone else. If someone makes an error, I focus on myself and I know that I can’t control what anyone else does, but I can control what I do. Next year, I’ll be a senior so I’ll start leading a little bit more and letting everyone know ‘hey, it’s alright if we have one bad inning, there’s six other innings.’”

With the experience of this year’s losses and pitching 23 games this year, Miller looks to the next school year’s season as what’s next, calling the completed season ‘last year’ despite it only ending weeks ago.

“This year we struggled at the beginning then as the season went on, Kat really took over and did a really good job with it,” Dyson said. “She’ll see what her junior year did for her and as a senior she’ll step it up a little more. What she has done with all these innings has strengthened her. I think we’ll all see a really awesome pitcher and leader next year, I really do.”

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