As with many teens moving from one school to another, Sadie Meadows admits to having some apprehension about what lay ahead of her at Mount St. Mary Academy when her family moved to Arkansas from their native Alabama last summer.
“It has definitely been a very different experience for me,” the junior said. “I came from a really big public school in Alabama so it was quite a change, not only going from public to private, but also with the size change and the Catholic affiliation and it’s all girls. It’s definitely been a big change for me.
“I was really nervous going into the school year. I didn’t know if the girls were going to be kind of catty or what because it’s all girls, you know? I didn’t know if it was going to be hard to break into friend groups or anything like that.”
Meadows said her fears proved unfounded and that she was immediately embraced by the Belle community, which helped her quickly fall in love with being a “Mount Girl.”
“Everybody was very kind and it was a lot easier transition than I was expecting,” she said. “I definitely felt very welcome and very loved by everybody.”
While she may have been pleasantly surprised at how easily she fit into the ranks of the houndstooth, Meadows’ integration on the Belle softball team was all but a given. The right-handed catcher has been a perennial all-star since grade school and played on her first national traveling team as a rising eighth grader. Last fall, she was a member of California-based Firecrackers-Wallace, a top 10-ranked team in the country, and this summer, she will play for Rock Gold Manetta in Florida, a club ranked in the top three nationally.
Needless to say, she was also a two-year starter on her previous high school team and a shoo-in to start for the Belles, which couldn’t slot her fourth in the lineup fast enough.
“My public school in Alabama was very big, and there were just tons of girls on the team,” she said. “Like, a lot of those girls had never met each other before playing on the high school team together because the schools were so big. I think one thing that has really stuck out to me in Arkansas softball, at least with the teams I’m seeing, is because many of them are smaller schools, there’s a lot more sportsmanship and teammates bond a lot more because it’s a smaller group of girls and they have to work together. It’s different and it’s really, really fun.”
Still, Meadows’ success in the sport is still a little surreal, considering where she started out skill-wise.
“I was really bad when I started softball. I was the kid, when you got to coach-pitch, you would strike out, and they’d have to bring the tee out for you to hit off of. Like, I was horrible,” she said. “My best friend’s dad was the coach for our rec league team, and he taught me how to hit. I got good at hitting, and that was kind of my specialty. I didn’t have any specific softball talents, but I’ve always been tall and I’ve always been bigger than the other kids.
“When I got into middle school ball, they told me I was going be a catcher. I was not great, but my dad started working with me and got me into lessons because I wanted to keep playing softball, and I didn’t want to have to worry about being cut from the team. Every year I had to come back to tryouts and hope that I would make the team and that nobody better who played my position would try out.”
Those days are well behind her. Having excelled at the elite level in club team play, the 16-year-old is getting a lot of attention in the softball world. Last year, she was ranked 35th at her position nationally, and this season, she’s considered the 19th best catcher in the country.
As such, she’s already received an unofficial offer to play at Dartmouth as well as interest from Liberty University, Western Michigan, Kansas, Clemson, Oklahoma State and Mississippi State.
The question of which college to attend will, of course, be answered in due time, but for now, Meadows is buckling down to revive the Mount softball program and help lead it back to the state tournament. It is a challenge she’s more than willing to tackle.
“My dad always describes playing catcher like being the field general, the commander of the softball field,” she said. “I guess that’s why I like it, because I feel like it puts me in a leadership position. I like to direct the field and take on that role when I’m in the game.”
