Gretna’s Haynes still shocked about state softball player of the year honor

By Matt Fuchs
Danville Register & Bee
Published: July 10, 2008

Even the thought of the whole thing still makes Ceseley Haynes feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

After all, Haynes was still in the process of letting her Region B Player of the Year award sink in as she lay on her couch watching TV on July 3 when her phone rang. It was her Gretna Hawks softball coach, Ketina Brooks.

“Coach carries on this casual conversation and then says, ‘I’m just calling to see how the voice of an all-state player of the year sounds,’” Haynes said. “It was unreal.”

After batting .511 with 26 runs (both team-highs) in her senior season, Haynes was selected by the Group A coaches as their player of the year. She also had 17 RBIs (second best on the team) and was also named to the Dogwood District’s first team in addition to her Region B first-team and player of the year selections.

Not bad for a kid who never intended to play softball in the first place.

“Absolutely not,” Haynes said when asked if she ever even dreamed about hauling in such hardware. “But coach always told us that it would come with time. And I guess it came with time for me.”

Haynes actually had to be recruited to the team in the eighth grade by Brooks, who saw obvious potential in Haynes — who wound up with the nickname “SportsCenter” because of her playmaking ability in center field and at the plate.

“She plays the game just to play the game, to have fun,” Brooks said of Haynes. “She and Teresa (Dalton) have always been the main catalysts of the team.”

Haynes proved that much time and time again in the Hawks’ Group A state title run this season.

She scored the winning run in a last-gasp, four-run rally to help Gretna beat Middlesex 5-4 in the state quarterfinals. And then Haynes scored crucial runs in both the state semifinals and finals — low-scoring victories over James River 3-0 and Glenvar 2-0.

“It wasn’t a question of if. When she got on base she was scoring,” Brooks said. “She’s going to be incredibly hard to replace.”

But the Hawks’ loss is Virginia Tech’s gain. Haynes will attend the university on academic scholarship after finishing her senior year at Gretna with a 4.1 GPA that put her in the top four percentile of her graduating class. Haynes had also attended the Piedmont Governor’s School for the past two years, and will enter Virginia Tech as a second-semester sophomore. She plans to major in Biological Sciences with the goal of beginning a career in dentistry.

“It’s an indescribable feeling,” Haynes said of receiving the state’s player of the year honors. “But even though I got the player of the year, I was still more happy for my team. It’s one of the best things to win a state championship. It’s even better to have my teammates and friends enjoy that with me.”