Morganton Rec's state champion softballers

By: Roy Waters | Morganton News Herald
Published: September 29, 2009

The resurgence of girls softball in our community has been welcomed as just a few years ago our teams were at the bottom of their conference nearly every year.
I first saw a marked improvement several years ago with coach Thad Fox's Freedom High team. They went from one of the weakest teams in the Northwestern 4A to among the best in less than two years.
The girls game took an opposite path than our boys baseball did. The boys success started with their great run toward a national Little League championship in 2004, and these players are now showing up on the high school level.
This year, our girls took the opposite route when the Morganton Recreation Department's Little Leaguers won the state softball championship and made a good showing in the southeastern regional.
I asked Colon Saunders, who coached these girls, about the improvement in the sport over the past few years. He told me what I expected to hear, that most of it came from the tremendous number of games played by traveling teams.
These young ladies start playing at 8- and 9-years-old and may play as many as 50 games over the summer.
There are not many youth coaches around better than Saunders. He has given many, many years to the leadership of our youngsters and has had great success with his teams.
He started his playing days at Salem in the county youth league but moved on to the city's program where he played on a state championship baseball team for the Morganton Recreation Department.
At Salem Junior High, he was a starting infielder on Coach Dennis Leonard's eighth and ninth grade baseball teams and the starting quarterback for Coach Roger Baker in football, where the team lost only one game.
At Freedom High, Saunders started on the baseball team three years at shortstop and second base and batted over .400 his sophomore year. His senior year, the team won nearly 20 games and made the state's final four.
That 1979 season's team was one of the best ever at Freedom. Coached by Wilton Daves, it included Jesse Francis, Tony Causby and Freddie Davis along with Saunders.
Saunders attended Phiefer College for two years but was disappointed in his playing time there as he had to play behind coaches sons.
He transferred to N.C. State and gave up his baseball playing days. After getting an electrical engineering degree, he worked in Raleigh with the North Carolina Electric Membership Corp. before moving to the Rutherford branch where he has worked for the past 22 years.
Saunders and his wife live in southern Burke County where they have raised their three children. They include Cassie, one of the better softball players around who was a starter on this year's state championship team, and two older sons.
Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-66, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.

Morganton Rec's state champion softballers

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