Story by Emma Kenfield
Photos courtesy of Katie Perkins
The best movies in sports are about the heroes.
It makes sense, really. They’re exciting, outstanding and unexpected. Heroes get the fans, the fame and the fortune. They’re the ones in the spotlight. Heroes make for good movies, for the world craves rarities.
Life, though, isn’t always about being the hero.
Sometimes, life is about being the person in the background, who steadily but consistently keeps things afloat. Perhaps that person is more admirable. For she doesn’t crave the validation that comes with dramatic actions of heroism, which thrust her into the limelight and give her name recognition. Perhaps it is more of a rarity to be steadily wonderful rather than occasionally extraordinary.
Perhaps it is better to be her, to be Katie Perkins.
The freshman UNC softball player has never been described as someone to make the outstanding plays, hit the home runs or outrun the throw to first. She’s a different kind of player. One who never misses a routine play, who always comes to the plate with the team’s best interest in mind and does it silently.
Her stable consistency holds the foundation together. And without her, the team would fall through the cracks.
Perkins is not the hero—she’s the glue.
—
In October 2000, Sharon Perkins received a letter in the mail from Coach John Rittman. It had been five days since giving birth to her first child, Katie.
In his letter, the Stanford coach said he wanted to be the first to offer Sharon’s daughter a softball scholarship.
Sharon had an impact on the softball world in this way. A three-time Southland Conference champion at Nicholls State, a coach at the University of Georgia and a three-time ACC Coach of the Year at Georgia Tech, it was clear that Sharon’s daughter would know the game of softball. And if she’d choose to play, she had big shoes to fill.
But from the time that Katie Perkins could hold a softball, it was obvious: it was never a choice for her. It was second nature.
Her father, Cris, was her T-ball coach at age 4, and he could tell right away she had something special.
“She was very driven, even at that age,” he said. “She was always wanting to hit, pitch, throw, do whatever. When you saw her with other kids, she was just on another wavelength.”
He wasn’t the only one who took notice of Katie early on. At the 2005 NFCA Leadoff Classic, 4-year-old Perkins hit balls in the cage with her father. Sharon was the head coach at Georgia at this time, so Cris decided to keep his daughter busy with some front-toss while the team played.
“Nebraska and Cal State Northridge were warming up, and I was over there pitching to her,” he said. “She was just hitting bombs. Those two teams stopped what they were doing, and just watched her hit.”
Sharon may have had an impressive career, but Katie still managed to surprise her at a young age, as well.
When Katie was 11, her mother brought her to one of her practices at Georgia Tech. Sharon decided to let her join in on some of the drills.
One was called “Three Line.” The goal was to field and throw cleanly a certain number of balls at each station before you moved onto the next.
“It’s a physically and mentally exhausting drill that’s fast-paced with high pressure,” Sharon said. “Katie finished the drill before some of the college players who always do this drill. I realized she’s a mentally tough player who can hang with anybody.”
For Katie, who’d been immersed in college athletics her whole life, showing out in front of important people was no scary feat. She was the bat-girl for her mother’s teams as a child, attending every game she could. Her first exposure to the game was at the highest level. That level of competition and drive was ingrained in her from the start.
“She just would work,” said her mother. “She’d be like 10 or 11 years old, and I would just smoke balls at her. And she just would get better. It was a ‘there’s somethin’ to this kid’ kinda-thing.”
Cris recalls a specific car-ride following a bad tournament. Eleven-year-old Perkins was defeated. She’d made a few errors, and the tournament slipped away from her team. He asked Katie and her brother, Nick, how they’d like to spend the rest of their afternoon. He wanted to help get her mind off of things.
“Do y’all want to see a movie, or go get ice cream?” asked Cris.
“I wanna go see mom’s practice,” Katie replied.
Surprised but willing, Cris drove the two 32 miles north to Georgia Tech. He has a photo of Katie standing beside her mother at home plate that day, still dressed in her dusty uniform.
Perkins was raised on a college softball field. It wasn’t a choice for her to follow her mother’s footsteps. It was second nature.
Perhaps John Rittman jumped the gun on his offer. Or, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he knew she was born to play softball.
—
I was 8 years old the first time someone told me I could really do it.
Ten years old the first time I went to a college camp at the University of Georgia.
Twelve years old the first time I played in front of college coaches.
I was never her, though.
Because through all the camps, training and tournaments, I never had more than the “there’s somethin’ to this kid” kinda-thing.
When I was 13 years old, my father sat me down and told me straight: If you want to play at UNC, you need to join a travel team like the Georgia Impact or the Vipers. I thought about this decision a lot…what it would mean to leave my current team, the time I would need to sacrifice, whether or not I was even good enough.
I elected to stay where I was. I didn’t admit it then, but I knew. Any chance to play for a school like UNC vanished on that day, as well.
Just a town over, in Suwannee, Georgia, however, Katie Perkins would walk the path I so denied. The path which led her to Anderson Stadium, dressed in Carolina Blue.
She joined the Georgia Impact when she was nine years old. Her hitting coach, David Martin, hosted practice at his farm, where the team would practice hitting in an open field. This was her first travel team, and she’d already one-upped me.
“It’s really funny,” she said. “Knowing who played on that team. They’re all playing in college now, just like me.”
Perkins struggled in the beginning, however
“I didn’t really play,” she admitted. “I remember, I finally got the opportunity to play right field, and I got hit a routine fly ball. I literally had it, but it popped right out of my glove. I was like Wow, I really suck. I’ll never forget that moment.”
Impact was where she got her start, but the Dirt Dogs was the team that made her. She joined just a year later, and would remain a member for three years. She made her closest friends here, and gained the skills she needed to succeed at the highest level.
“I started to get better on that team and eventually was hitting in the 2-hole behind my best friend,” she said.
Perkins also found her place in the field at second base, a difficult thing to do as a leftie. When a position is far better-suited for right-handed players, but a leftie claims the spot, she has to be something special.
Softball had always been a part of her identity. She now knew her identity within softball: the person who always comes through, but never asks for attention. Katie Perkins is the glue.
With Sharon Perkins as a mother, she’d be missing out not to play under her. Upon her retirement from college coaching, Sharon formed a 14U team under the Atlanta Premier organization. Katie played second base and batted lead-off.
“I coached ‘em like I did my college kids,” Sharon recalls. “I knew she could handle the pressure, because it’s already hard to be the coach’s kid. And I wasn’t playing daddy-ball, I was pushing her—hard.”
Sharon said get on Katie whenever she’d make a mistake, sometimes tell her she should “quit and take piano lessons instead.” Katie loved it, though. With every failure, she worked harder, staying after games to work on her hitting, coming to the field early to field groundballs. Whatever she needed to do to improve, she did so without the slightest complaint.
Sharon saw her daughter in a different light, watching her from the third-base line instead of in the bleachers.
“She’s just never gonna be that showy kid that’s gonna brag or anything,” Sharon said. “She’s a good kid, she’s a great teammate and she’s super coachable. She’s gonna do whatever you want her to do to the best of her ability.”
Her mother noted how reliable she is as a player. She doesn’t make the crazy, unpredictable plays. She’s not the hero. But she makes the routine plays every time, she has an excellent arm and she never misses a throw. She’s the kind of player you can count on, and she gives it her all without asking for validation or praise.
The Premier team ultimately made it to nationals, where Perkins caught UNC’s eye for the first time. She was 13 years old when her team placed second in the 16U division.
Perkins said that contributing to her team’s success and proving she could do it as a left-handed second-baseman was a pinnacle moment in her career.
At 16, she moved onto the 18U Gold Vipers team, coached by Dick Vallery. Vallery’s teams were legends in Georgia softball. If you could make it there, especially as a 16-year-old, you could make it anywhere.
On the Vipers, Vallery had Katie playing all over the first-base-side, some second base, first base and right field. He wanted to best prepare his players for college, where they’d need to have the skills to move around.
“I always looked at Katie as being clutch,” he said. “If I needed a hit, a run scored, a bunt down, if I needed anything done, Katie was clutch.”
Vallery can’t recall a time when she wasn’t smiling, for she loved the game and her teammates. She was a composed player, whose mindset was always set on what to do better, not what she’d done wrong.
“She was always happy, always smiling, and always willing to do what the team needed,” he said.
I often find myself wondering what it would be like to live the life I turned down. Travel ball was one of the most influential moments of my life, but I never got to see the level of play that Perkins was immersed in her entire career.
So, I asked her what she had that I didn’t, why she could do it and I couldn’t.
And I think it all makes sense to me now.
“I just never thought anything different,” she said.
The decision to quit was a big one for me, but a decision I made nonetheless. The difference between her and me is that there was never a decision for her. Softball is her identity. It was never a choice.
—
It was the bottom of the seventh inning.
Buford High School’s softball program has a reputation. They win, and everyone knows it.
It was the bottom of the seventh inning, and their 10th straight state championship was in sight. Winning nine is impressive, but winning ten—that leaves a different kind of mark on the softball world.
The season was as it always was: filled with wins and success. It was the bottom of the seventh inning, though, and no matter how good their season may have been, if sophomore Katie Perkins didn’t knock in this winning run, they could go down as second-best for the first time in a decade.
Staring back at her from the mound was Kayla Poynter, barely short of six-feet-tall, a star player signed to Texas A&M.
“She was built,” said Perkins. “You’re up to bat and it looks like she’s two feet away from you throwin’ gas, so it’s pretty intimidating.”
Intimidating or not, Perkins knew her job was to move the runner from second to home. It was a moment better fit for few, for she was always known for coming in clutch.
The pitch was thrown, with just enough gas, and Perkins did just that. A ground ball up the middle. The run scored. Buford High School earned their 10th straight state championship title, and Perkins got the unusual chance to be a hero for a day.
“I just don’t imagine there’s many better moments than to get that hit and come in clutch for your team and your school, and help win that state championship,” said her high school coach, Tony Wolfe.
High school softball is different from travel. There is a certain pride which comes with playing for your community alongside classmates and teachers. Winning means winning for your town, and Perkins said she loved every minute of it.
As an eighth grader, she knew that if she wanted to play varsity the following year, second base was already taken. She learned to play first base to earn her spot, and ended up playing in most of the games.
Wolfe said that even as a freshman, Perkins was poised and calm, which is a rarity among competitive athletes coming into high school for the first time.
“She was a great athlete, but it’s really just her softball IQ, her ability to remain calm and her inner confidence that really stood out to me early in her career,” he said. “She just knows how to play the game.”
Buford softball taught her even more what it meant to be a teammate, to care about the bigger picture rather than her personal success.
“I’m gonna do whatever it takes to help us win,” she said. “Not everyone is happy having to bunt, but I’m just as happy with that as a base hit if it means I’m doing my job. I’m here to help the team win.”
—
At 13 years old, I was crying because my softball tournament would conflict with an annual beach trip.
At 13 years old, Katie Perkins was crying because she thought a bad game in Orlando would cost her the chance to play at UNC.
It’s funny to think about, really.
I couldn’t even commit to one weekend, and Perkins was in tears because she thought she threw her future away as a seventh-grader.
“It’s ridiculous that you’re making a life choice in middle school,” Perkins recalled. “At that age, I really had to grow up. While everyone else is having fun on the weekends, you’re having a four-hour softball practice on a Saturday.”
Luckily, Perkins knew her answer early on. After one visit to Chapel Hill in eighth grade, she said she could have committed on the spot.
“I just fell in love with it.”
She held out, though, until freshman year of high school, when 14-year-old Perkins officially decided to be a Tar Heel. That rainy tournament in Orlando didn’t matter, after all.
Committing at 14 is almost cruel, though.
“You get a lot of eyes on you when you commit that early,” said her mother. “And then you’re playing with other people and against other people, and you kinda hear little who do they think they are kinda-things.”
Perkins had to be on at all times, but that was no issue for her. She’d practice whenever she could to prepare, heading to the field with her mother at 6 a.m. just to get some swings in before school that day.
“We’d go hit four or five times a week, or I’d get her extra reps defensively,” said Sharon. “We would always play at the highest level to get her ready.”
Four years of anticipation later, she finally arrived at Anderson Stadium, dressed in Carolina Blue.
This season was a “typical freshman season,” as both her and her father put it. She started in 10 games, had four hits and three RBI’s. Cut short by COVID-19, Perkins was just getting out of a little slump when everything was put on hold.
“I had a good start,” said Perkins. “When I was given an opportunity, I took advantage of it, and I was kind of on a roll. I hit a little bit of a rough patch, and when I started to pick back up again, the season stopped.”
Perkins is a utility player on defense who sees most of her playing time in the outfield. Her old coach, Dick Vallery, was right: she needed to be prepared to play anywhere if she wanted to start in college.
Her favorite memory as a Tar Heel so far is beating The University of Alabama, ranked number two in the nation. UNC lost the first game, 5-2, but came back in the second game to win 9-8. To Perkins, UA represented the level of play that she’d been waiting to experience since she watched her mother coach as a child.
Perkins said she expects more from herself next year, and wants to take advantage of this extra year of eligibility offered to all college spring athletes whose season was cancelled amid the pandemic.
Dominique Monteon, another freshman utility player, said Perkins is the most genuine person she knows.
“Recently, I had surgery so I wasn’t able to play,” said Monteon. “She was just always supportive like, ‘Whatever you need, I can do it.’ You know, like ‘If you need help with school work or getting back into training, I got you.’”
Monteon notes Perkins’ level of dedication, and said she’s proud of how much hard work Perkins put into this season. They both struggled initially, coming into college with so much built-up anticipation. Perkins worked hard to adjust to this level of play, and Monteon said she could tell that she was always trying to improve.
“Even after we practice for, like, six hours in a day, she’s always like, ‘Let’s go hit or something.’ She’s just super dedicated,” she said.
—
The best movies in sports are about the heroes.
Perkins doesn’t need a movie, a book or even this article.
In fact, I think I needed it more.
It’s been eight years since I turned down the path I could have walked. I often find myself wondering what my life could have been like, if I’d have been happier saying “yes,” to a future in softball.
The truth is, I could never have done it. Writing over three thousand words about a girl who could, however, gave me a glimpse of the life I turned down.
I felt closure in learning who she is—the most supportive person to her teammates, the clutch player to her coaches and someone you can count on to everyone in her life.
Perkins craves the game in a way that needs no validation. She was designed with an unspoken greatness, that thrives best under-the-radar.
So, yes, the best movies in sports are about the heroes. But they can keep their spotlight.
Because some of us were meant to be the glue.
Holding it all together, never asking for praise or fame.
Some of us were meant to be like her.
To be Katie Perkins.
