By Charles Prince

The North Jefferson News



CORNER — After reaching the Class 4A state tournament for the past two seasons, the Corner Lady Yellow Jackets want to take the next step and bring home a state championship trophy.

“We have some smaller goals along the way,” Corner head coach Aaron James said. “But our ultimate goal is to win the state title. We’ve been there and we had the experience of being there with this group twice. We went there with an inexperienced team two years ago, but if we make it to Montgomery this year, we’ll have an experienced team there that has set the goal of bringing home a title.”

James has eight starters back from last year’s club, including pitchers Elizabeth Allred, who won 20 games and struck out 233 batters in 189 innings in 2007, Kortney Sloan who went 9-2 last season with 1.63 ERA and Heather Anderson who went 10-4 with 126 strikeouts in 73 innings.

“We should be pretty good this year,” James said. “We’ve got strong pitching with pitching depth. I’ve got my top three pitchers back and they’ve got lots of experience. Including experience against some of the top teams in the state.”

Corner should also be a strong club at the plate, after the 2007 Lady Jackets hit over .300 as a team and totaled more than 20 homers.

Catcher Mandy Slatton returns after hitting .410 last year with 50 RBIs and 42 runs scored. Allred hit .396 with four home runs and 57 RBIs. Also back, are Ashley Tolbert, who hit .387 with 22 stolen bases and 46 RBIs, Jennifer Tolbert, who hit .372 with 21 steals and 36 RBIs, Heather Anderson hit .321 with four home runs and 33 RBIs and Haley Anderson, who hit .314 with a team high six home runs and 37 RBIs.

“We’ve got all of our key hitters back,” James said. “We should be a very good hitting ball club that can score plenty of runs.”

James thinks his team will face a schedule that’s even tougher than the grueling slate his Lady Jackets faced in 2007. Corner played more games than any area school last season, but James said it wasn’t really planned that way.

“We played nearly 70 games because we won or got to the finals of every tournament we played in,” he said. “We went to the Bob Jones tournament, where you are guaranteed to play three games, and we played eight, because we reached the finals. It was like that the whole year long. We’d played lots of games because we played so well in all the tournaments we entered.”

The 2007 club was the first in school history to win mor than 50 games, but James said his players don’t think about the team’s numbers.

“We don’t talk about records,” he said. “The only thing we think about around here is winning.”