Lady Eagles’ coach takes top honor again this year

In all his life, Kevin Sullivan may never have another year like 2016.

Sullivan, 37, led his Vilonia Lady Eagles to their third consecutive Class 5A softball state championship appearance, where they defended their title in a game for the ages — 5-4 in eight innings over their 5A-West and Faulkner County rival Greenbrier.

He was named an assistant for the West in last week’s Arkansas High School Coaches Association All-Star Softball Games.

He and his wife, Hannah, were expecting their first child, son Jaxon Mark, on June 24.

And he is the River Valley & Ozark Edition Softball Coach of the Year for the second consecutive year.

Looking back, he said, it was easy to see how his life had led him to this place.

“I had a lot of fun learning how to coach the girls and learning the game as I’ve gone along,” he said, explaining how he hadn’t intended to coach, and after he did, had fallen into softball. “It’s been a lot of fun and a great testimony to how God works in your life. I’m living my dream job, really — a small town with a great school.”

Sullivan’s career path has turned out to be quite a bit different from what he’d anticipated when he graduated from the University of Central Arkansas in Conway in 2001 with a business degree and a job offer as a human resource manager for an International Paper Co. facility in Nacogdoches, Texas.

Sullivan, who grew up in De Queen and played basketball and baseball for two years at Central Baptist College in Conway before transferring to UCA to finish his degree, went home after graduation prior to the start of what he thought would be his new job. But by then, the company had a hiring freeze in place, and with an economy that wasn’t great, hardly any one else was hiring, either.

“Everywhere I went, they’d say, ‘Your resume looks impressive, but we’re not hiring anybody,’” Sullivan remembered. “At that point, I thought to myself, ‘There’s got to be a reason none of this is working out.’”

During that summer, he ran into a couple of people who urged him, independently, to pursue his coaching endorsement. So he returned to UCA for the fall semester to get the coaching endorsement and pursue the nontraditional teacher’s license. He was in a long-term substitute position at his alma mater in February 2002 when a man from Horatio called to ask if he’d be interested in coaching softball.

“I told him I’d committed to finishing the year in De Queen, and he said the next year they were going to have an assistant football/seventh-grade basketball/girls softball slot,” Sullivan said. “I told him that would be great. Three days later, on a Friday morning, I’m getting ready to go to work, and he calls me at 7:30 and said, ‘They hired you last night. You need to be here Monday.’

“So I showed up at Horatio High School the day I turned 23 years old. Our first game was a week later. I had five whole days to practice them. Here I was going to coach fastpitch softball, and I’d never seen the game before.”

He said he’d considered himself to be a football/basketball guy, but he quickly found his niche with softball. In nine seasons at Horatio, he led the Lady Lions to two conference titles and the 2004 Class 2A state-championship game while building a 166-93 record. In two seasons at Jacksonville, he took the Lady Red Devils to a pair of state-tournament appearances. In three seasons at the helm of the Vilonia program, he has taken the Lady Eagles to three Class 5A state-championship games, winning in 2015 and ’16. His Vilonia record is 79-18 (.814).

His 14-year overall coaching record is 266-132.

Three times over the years, he said, his friend Tommy Stephens, also from De Queen and coaching at Vilonia, had alerted him to coaching openings there. Twice, Sullivan decided he wasn’t ready to move, but by 2012, he was.

He had never been an assistant coach, but in 2013, his first softball season there, Sullivan took over as hitting instructor under former VHS coach Calvin Robinette. The Lady Eagles reached the state semifinals that year.

“I learned a lot,” Sullivan said. “There are different ways to do things. Coach Robinette was a big small-ball guy, and I am very much the opposite of that, but he taught me.”

Sullivan took over the program when Robinette left.

“They’ve been pretty successful without me, but we really tried to come in and get the kids to buy into the team, which is very tough in today’s society,” Sullivan said. “They buy into working hard and doing everything fast. We’re not out there four or five hours a night; we’re there two 1/2, three, but most of the time when we’re done, the kids are saying, ‘Already?’

“We’ve got good kids who work really hard. We try to make a point of supporting their other interests as well. We get to volleyball games and basketball games and track meets. We want them to know we’re invested in them and not just in what they can do for us.”

Sullivan and his assistants, Brooke Rexroat and Brandi Johns, have built the program to rosters of 30-plus players over the past three years. With 20 or so on the varsity squad, the others are developing on a freshman/junior varsity team that has obviously yielded good results for future seasons.

But tryouts, which the Lady Eagles recently finished for 2017, are difficult for Sullivan. He said he kept 18 for the varsity squad, with the other 18 on the JV/freshman team.

“Most of the time, the ninth-graders who’ve been with us a year have improved and feel more confident at tryouts,” he said. “The program has been successful, so we have high expectations.”

In 2014, his first season, Sullivan took the Lady Eagles to a 24-7 record and a state runner-up finish to White Hall, 7-3.

In 2015, the Lady Eagles finished 28-4 after winning their final 23 games, including a 5-2 win over Paragould in the state-championship game. Buggy Lyons’ three-run home run made the difference, and she was named tournament MVP. Only four seniors graduated off that squad, so the 2016 Lady Eagles were loaded, including seniors Sydney Wader at pitcher; Madison Daves, outfielder; Morgan Gray, catcher; Sarah Brantley, center fielder; Cassie Leach, shortstop; Mattison Rhoades, pitcher; Alexis Hightower, designated hitter; and Jessica Maxwell, outfielder.

In 2016, Vilonia went 27-7 but didn’t put together any long winning streaks like in ’15. The Lady Eagles lost to Bentonville, Bald Knob, Sheridan, Farmington, North Little Rock and Greenbrier (twice). Greenbrier won the 5A-West; Vilonia was runner-up to its rival.

“We had a chance to have a big streak, but in the last regular-season doubleheader, we were up 7-1 in the sixth inning against Greenbrier, and they scored five in the sixth and two in the seventh and beat us,” Sullivan said. “At that point, I thought, ‘Maybe we just don’t have it.’ I was really surprised. The pressure of trying to go back to back and trying to repeat was too much. I was really concerned.

“We came back and won the next game (of the doubleheader), but I was afraid the damage was done.”

He was wrong.

As the No. 2 seed from the West at the state tournament in Harrison, the Lady Eagles faced a murderer’s row of Sylvan Hills, Paragould and De Queen.

But Sullivan said that at the team meal the night before the first game, he found some peace.

“I watched all my seniors walk in, and three of them had their Bibles,” he said. “I felt like my seniors were going to take charge. We played lights-out through the state tournament, and I give my seniors a lot of credit for that. Earlier in the season, we’d struggled to get one of them to step up and be a leader, and at the last minute, we got all eight of them. It was a blessing.”

Vilonia outscored Sylvan Hills, Paragould and De Queen by a combined 33-2 to reach the championship game. The Lady Eagles had split four meetings with Greenbrier, with the largest margin of victory two runs.

This one went back and forth, Vilonia taking a 4-3 lead into the bottom of the seventh on Gray’s RBI single. Greenbrier tied it in the bottom of the inning to force an extra frame. Wader delivered a two-out RBI single in the top of the eighth and, with runners at second and third in the bottom of the inning, struck out the final batter for the 5-4 decision. She was named MVP.

At press time, Sullivan said his summer plans included being on baby watch and Eagle football, where he is an assistant coach.

A chance for a softball three-peat in 2017?

“I’m going to focus on my boy and then worry about that when the spring rolls around,” he said.

He’s earned that.

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