Sycamore High School Softball

08/21/2026

We know her!! A great example that perseverance can pay off!! Way to go Allie D! 👏🏼👏🏼
PS. There are five Spartan Ballers on this new team!! 🥎🤝🏈

One girl's social media campaign became reality: Sycamore is hosting its first girls flag football game Tuesday against Cary-Grove. Allison Densberger, who started the push, is starting at QB.

08/20/2026

‘Twas the night before school starts..but there’s still time for one more summer announcement!! Congratulations to Hailey for finding her next stop! A hard working kid ready to put in some seriously good work at the next level!! 🖤💛➡️💚🤍

08/14/2026

🚨Good news alert!!🚨What an AMAZING way to kick off the weekend and school year!! Congrats to our girl Leah for finding her next home! One of the most versatile kids we’ve had. Here comes a big, competitive spirit! We are excited to see what’s next for you!! 🖤💛➡️💙🩶

08/14/2026

When the sign comes out for its yearly appearance, you KNOW it’s almost “go time”! Welcome Class of 2030!! Thanks Allie D and Grace for repping us tonight!! 🥎😎

08/02/2026

Welcome to the neighborhood Miss Keisha! We’ve got you. (Including Journey who is sad there isn’t room for her on the cat stand! 😂) 🐊🐘🐢🐼🦒🦁🍯🦎

07/30/2026

Time for a retirement shout out! If you know Sycamore, you know David. He always talked baseball/softball w/us & ALWAYS wished us good luck. Lots of chats on the Cubs and the Bears too. After attending Syc schools his whole life & working THIRTY EIGHT years (😱) for the district, he’s hanging them up! Best of luck David! 🍀 We will miss our chats! Congratulations! 👏🏼👏🏼🥳

07/09/2026

🚨Let’s celebrate Cam! So excited for you to figure out your next chapter! UWW has a super funny, super competitive, team-first player coming their way. Proud of you Cami!! 🖤💛➡️💜🤍

07/08/2026

Today we welcomed 15 future Spartan Ballers to The Swamp for a couple of hours of fun in the sun! I apologize for not having too many pics of this amazing group. 3rd-5th graders love to keep you on your toes so picture taking time was at a premium! 😅 I promise you, we all had a great time!

We opened up our day with some intros and figuring out which of our young campers went to the same elementary school as our coaches. Then, we warmed up by playing some Sharks and Minnows. 🦈🐟 A PE classic! We then introduced the girls to our high school arm stretches. Excellent job helping our coaches count while doing this!

We spent some time finding partners and working on our throwing and catching. The girls learned our "high five" drill, one of our load drills and then some shuffle, shuffle throws for some and "put it all together" for others. Coach Brady told me some of our older girls were really throwing hard when we got our bodies moving! Great job! After we worked on our throwing technique, we of course needed to have some fun target practice. Bring on the dinos! 🦖 We had multiple girls knock the dino off the bucket today. 😤 I think all kids (regardless of age) could do this for probably a half hour. Their competitive juices really get flowing!

After that it was time for a snack break. Everyone was ready. Juice boxes and a couple snacks had us refueled and ready to go for the last 45 minutes. 💪🏻 We did some infield work on how to approach a grounder and how to field and throw. Then we wrapped up our time on the field with some fly ball work. This can be especially intimidating for beginning players. We used some lite flites (much lighter than a regular softball) to encourage the girls to use proper form. Easier said than done, but they did understand if it hit them in the head, it wouldn't hurt very much. I told them you could also just ball up a pair of socks and use that. The fear factor is now limited and they can work on using good form and the task of catching the ball.

Our last activity of the day was our water balloon toss. It took a few rounds but they DID get better as we went on trying to be "gentle" on the catch. Progress is progress! 🙌🏻 The best throws of the day came when it was a free for all water balloon fight to finish up camp. For the first time ever I got smoked in the face and had water balloon remnants in my mouth! 🏳️ I appreciated the collective groan from the parent section during this moment 😂 I’m happy to take one for the "adults" team today. Big shout out to Sophia who "caught me" so the girls could dump (AGAIN) the water container all over me. We both got soaked on that one since I wouldn't let her go!! 😈 New friends were made (no for real, like exchanging phone numbers which was so cute!), a few things were learned and a lot of fun was had during our two hour session. We loved the effort and energy out of this group today! 🙌🏻🙌🏻👏🏼👏🏼👍🏻👍🏻

My shoes are currently drying out (AGAIN) and the dinosaurs have been put back to sleep and are resting until they are called back to action next summer.😴 We had three beautiful days and we were able to work with over 60 current and future Spartan Ballers. We are so grateful you chose to hang out with us this summer and hope to see you back at The Swamp for a game in the spring and camp next summer! Enjoy these last few weeks of summer before the “s” word begins!! 📚

PS MANY thanks to Coach Brady, Coach Hailey, Coach Grace, Coach Keera, Coach Rich and Coach Z for helping to make this an amazing time for all! 🙏

07/08/2026

Another gorgeous day at The Swamp as we wrapped up our 6-12th grade camp!
We got things started with another camp fave, Captain's Coming for our warm up game. It's kind of like a version of Simon Says for those who have no clue what it is. Ask your kid to demonstrate "Mermaid". 🧜🏻‍♀️ It'll be worth it. 😜

After that, we went over some reminders on throwing and some things on glove work when receiving (and a new way to try wearing our glove!)

Onto more infield and outfield work. After doing the second round of our rotation from yesterday, we got to the rest of the plan for the day. Outfield drills included: seat slides on short fly balls on our sliding mat, working on down and blocks and do or dies, and protecting the dinosaurs from extinction on Dino Island. 🦖 Infield work saw that group work on 1st base footwork, double play footwork for the middles, and ground ball footwork from 3rd base. We also worked on throws for a tag at the plate. A LOT going on in a total of 50 minutes! 🥵

Don't worry. We still took time to enjoy some snacks and juice boxes. During this time, our high schoolers talked about college recruiting or high school life and the middle schoolers discussed some high school life questions or "back to school" stuff with their people.

We wrapped up the day with Do or Dieno and whiffleball. I forgot to take pics of our winning teams but shout out to Cami's Kids, coached by Callie and Brady for earning a dub and Big Red Six Sev (Addi-I and Cami’s squad) for taking their second dub of camp week! 😤

It's always so much fun to get the high school girls back together after spending much of the summer apart with their travel teams. It's also a great experience for our middle school girls to be coached by our high school staff and our seniors, so that they can start to get excited for what is to come. It will get here faster than you think!

A fantastic job by our senior crew leading these two days. It can be challenging at times to lead your peers but this is a great opportunity for our oldest to work on that even more. I'm a BIG believer in our program's culture being at its best when it's the players who are willing to drive the bus. That starts with the seniors. KT, Coach Rich, Coach Z, Coach Finucane, thank you for stepping up and helping to make these two days successful for our program!

The girls were challenged to focus on 3 things over these two days:
1. Learn/refresh a skill-we worked on a lot so I sure hope this was accomplished!
2. Watch your words-to yourself, and each other (positive talk is a MUST to be successful individually AND collectively in this game)
3. Have some fun-remember why you started playing in the first place!!
We saw so many girls working so hard. We saw lots of high fives and supportive comments, and we saw lots of smiles and laughs over the two days. I think that's a pretty good sign that we can check all three of those boxes for most of our kids this week. ✅✅✅

Best of luck to everyone as they wrap up their travel ball seasons. Play hard! Be a good teammate! Controllables!! After that, my fingers are crossed for all of you that there is some time before school starts to be KIDS..let there be pools, a water balloon fight, Netflix, a good book, and some naps in your future. Thanks for hanging out with us this week! Until next year! 😎✌🏻🖤💛

07/06/2026

Had a beautiful day for our first day of camp today! Two days to remember why we play this game. Because it's FUN! Played some elbow tag for warm ups today and then showed the middle schoolers most of our high school dynamic warm up. It's lengthy but the intent is to warm up everything. I also had to remind them that when we do this it's usually in the 40s or 50s so it takes awhile to get everything going! We talked about how being able to do our warm up also shows off your athleticism. Working on smooth movements at times and explosive in others. It's a good opportunity to work in some conditioning and agility as well.

After that, we went through our high school throwing warm up. Again, a lot of intentional movements here. Working hard to be ball down, elbows up and finish with a "high five" follow through. Got in some throw behinds and relay footwork before going to Team Challenge #1 of the day, the popular Relay Line Race! Winners this year were the Big Red Six Sev group, coached by Addi and Cami. 👏🏼👏🏼 I'm sure it was a big motivational speech (or them yelling loudly at their team as the race was on) that pulled the squad through. Must have worked! Went 3-0!

Everyone needed a break after that, so it was time for some freeze pops. LOVE a good freeze pop on a summer day. The PERFECT cool down treat!

Then it was time for infield and outfield work! We really stress how important it is to be able to do a lot of skills well in our game. Everyone in our program practices fly balls and grounders. Whether you play infield or outfield, you will be getting both! We also want our girls to be comfortable playing multiple positions. This makes them more versatile when they get to high school. Both big groups worked on some fielding technique and some drop steps. We got through one rotation and will do the other rotation tomorrow.

We had to make sure there was time for the day's finale and another camp favorite, the water balloon toss! Always fun to work on soft hands with a water balloon! Had to DQ some water balloons from the start for being too small (we are on to your strategy people!!) Once those were replaced, the game began! The final toss was probably about 25 feet. Not bad! Winning team for this one was the Anonymous Imposters (AI) courtesy of Allie D and Rachel being the last group standing!! 😤 Their coaches, Leah and Keera, were pumped!! I was at a severe disadvantage this year since I cannot run so I wore a lot of water afterwards courtesy of some of the middle schoolers. I am writing your names down and there will be payback. 😈😜

Hopefully everyone learned or refreshed one thing and had some fun today. I saw lots of smiles and that is what these days are supposed to be all about. Let's do it again tomorrow! 😎