Down in Panama City, they were extremely consistent all tournament.”

Coach Camron Farrell

When Coach Camron Farrell settled on taking his U13 travel softball team, named the Dirt Dobbers, to Panama City instead of going back to Fort Walton like last summer, he had no idea that this one decision would turn into a once-in-a-lifetime experience for everyone involved, especially for the 11 girls on the team.

“We’re not like some of these big organizations or big teams, we’re a small team, but we go out and compete, man,” said Farrell, who is affectionately known to everyone around as “Coach Cam”. “Some of these girls want to play college ball, some others may not want to, but they all still want to play ball and have fun doing it. Of course I always feel like it’s my job to make sure they have the tools to do it with. We have a good time, we try to compete, and we give all we got. I told them, just play consistent, play consistent games. We played teams from everywhere [Indiana, Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, to name a few.], but we went in there and took it one game at a time.”

By approaching the biggest World Series tournament that the United States Fastpitch Association, otherwise known as the USFA, has to offer with that one-game-at-a-time mindset, the Dirt Dobbers defied the odds, shocking everyone by going 8-1 overall and winning the U14-C Championship, an age group that they weren’t even supposed to be playing in.

Before the tournament started on Monday, July 15th, the organizers made the decision to pull everyone out of the U13-B class since two teams couldn't make it and moved them into the U14-C class. Coach Cam says that was a little strange anyways because in Tennessee, there is just the U14 age group, not U13. The Dirt Dobbers are a 2010’s team with some 09 birthdays sprinkled in, so they are a younger U14 team already. This experience seemed to help them perform better down in Panama City where the Dobbers consistently played teams older than them. The competition featured an A class, B class, and C class for every age group. The two higher U14 classes each had 12 teams in them, so the majority of coaches voted to move the eight U13-B class teams into U14-C. The traveling Dobbers would take full advantage. 

“That made it a little bit sweeter [getting moved up an age bracket] because we went down there thinking we were going to play a 10 team tournament, but it ended up being 38 teams and we still took care of business,” he said. 

“We’ve been down there plenty of times chasing that ol’ surfboard.”

Farrell’s everyday job is being the SRO officer over at Community Middle School, but his true passion is coaching softball. He coaches the Community High Viqueens, and he has restored that program to being a regional powerhouse alongside Chapel Hill. The past three years, Community Softball has reached the state tournament twice in a row before being upset at home by Cheatham County this past season in the state sectional round. His success in Unionville has come in part due to his experience he has accumulated by coaching travel ball. Coach Cam has been the head coach of the Dirt Dobbers since 2005, but this was his first time he had ever won a tournament at Panama City.

The Dirt Dobbers themselves are a “somewhat local travel ball team.” These girls are 13 and 14 years old, almost all from Middle Tennessee (Unionville-3, Chapel Hill-2, Dickson-1 Murfreesboro-2, Eagleville-1, Manchester-1) with one from Summertown. Three of them are upcoming 8th graders while eight are incoming freshmen.

When he first started coaching in the travel ball circuit back in 2005, he took the Dirt Dobbers to Gatlinburg for a few summers before he began to go to Panama City.

“We didn't even have jerseys [in Gatlinburg], we just had white t-shirts and black shorts with drawn-on numbers,” Farrell remembered.

“We eventually started going to Panama City a few years later. I think we went down there six years in a row before the tournament just got way too big, so we started going to Gulf Shores instead. After that, once I started over with this group, we went to Fort Walton last year. Didn’t do so hot in Fort Walton, so I said ‘this year we’re going to go back to Panama City’ because we hadn’t been in a few years, and we just went from there.”

What did Coach Cam mean by “didn’t do so hot”? Well, with last summer being the current group’s final year in the U12 division, the Dirt Dobbers won just one game in pool play. Comparatively, the same team one year later LOST just one game in the entire competition, ironically in pool play.

“Every game we played at Fort Walton was close, but we just couldn’t finish one,” he said. 

This year, Farrell just wanted his team to go down and have fun while competing, and they did just that the moment they arrived in Panama City on Saturday, July 13..

The Dirt Dobbers’ first game was two days later, on Monday, July 15. 

“We played one pool game that day and beat a team from Ohio,” Farrell explained. “The next day we played two games. First game that day was against that ‘Top Gun’ team out of Indiana and we lost 8-6 before we played SOCal Athletics and won.”

“The actual tournament portion began on Wednesday, July 17. We won the one game we played that day, got a break, and then had to come back and play three games in one day on Thursday. We won all three of those games as well,” he continued.

After playing what totaled out to seven games across just four days, the Dirt Dobbers found themselves in the winners bracket final on Friday, July 19, against Adidas Gold. 

“Janiyah Leslie, she was the spark in that game [against Adidas Gold]. She hit a two-run home run that took the air out of that team,” Farrell said gleefully.

After their victory on Friday, the Dirt Dobbers had to wait and see who they would play in the Championship Game on Saturday. After a rainstorm pushed back the originally scheduled start time from 10:00 a.m. to just past noon, the game began. The Dobbers went down 2-0 almost immediately, but came back to score three of their own to take a 3-2 lead. After falling behind my multiple runs once again, the bats showed up to save the day. 

“We brought our bats, man. We got hot, base hit after base hit, and we ended up winning the championship, 7-6,” Farrell said. 

Coach Cam made sure to shout-out everyone involved that made the trip down to Florida.

“I was very pleased with the kids and their parents. If you’re going to go and compete and want to be clicking on all cylinders, it takes everybody,” he said. “Not just the coaches, not just the players, it takes the parents getting along too.”

His main takeaway from the Dirt Dobbers’ improbable run to their first-ever championship in Panama City? Consistency.

“Consistency is what this group needs to learn. We aren’t there yet, but we will get there,” he concluded. “Down in Panama City, they were extremely consistent all tournament. If we could just figure out that consistency part, we are a pretty tough team that can play anywhere against anybody.”

Cam Farrell and his assistant coaches, Bryan Calderaro and Marissa Turrentine, led the Dirt Dobbers to an overall summer record of 22-7 across six tournaments.