By Marty Gordon
NRVsports@ourvalley.org
Blacksburg High School’s Makayla Dowdy will continue her softball career at Emory & Henry College this coming fall. With friends and family present, she signed a letter of intent at the pitcher’s mound at BHS on Tuesday
This past season, Dowdy won 12 games with 99 strikeouts and hit six home runs. She finished with a staggering earned run average of 0.07.
Dowdy had 379 strikeouts as a pitcher during her three years on the varsity squad and was a four-year starter, garnering second-team all-River Ridge District as a freshman and first-team as a sophomore.
Her coach Marty McMahon called her a great leader in addition to being an outstanding pitcher.
She is expected to pitch and use her bat for the Wasps at Emory &Henry.
Coming off its runner-up finish in the Seguin Regional of the NCAA Division III Tournament, the Emory & Henry College softball team concluded its 2021 season ranked No. 13 by the National Fastpitch Coaches Association.
Emory & Henry (29-9 for the season, 13-3 in the Old Dominion Athletic Conference) posted a 3-2 record in the NCAA Division III Tournament, the deepest postseason run in program history. The Wasps fell in the regional championship to national runner-up Texas Lutheran University to finish tied for ninth in the tournament.
Tommy Forrester enters his eighth year as E&H’s head softball coach. His teams have played in two of the last three NCAA Division III national tournaments (2017, 2019 and 2021). He has amassed 191 wins in his first seven years, second-most in program history, and four wins shy of Shannon Piedmont, who accumulated 195 wins in her 10-year tenure from 1998 to 2007.
In a shortened 2020 season, the Wasps received an invitation and competed in the National Fastpitch College Associations (NFCA) Classic in Tucson, Ariz., and the Birmingham Southern College Spring Classic in Birmingham, Ala. Six of the team’s 17 games were against nationally ranked competition. The Wasps defeated No. 15 Birmingham-Southern 5-0 to open the season and earned a split of the games at Roanoke College to begin conference play before the season was cancelled due to precautions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2019, Forrester’s team won 25 games and proved to be one of the top teams in NCAA division III by playing an elite schedule and earning an at-large berth into the NCAA Division III Softball Championship Demorest Regional. The Wasps were the regular-season runners-up in the conference and finished the year with four victories over teams that were featured in the final NFCA Top 25 ranking: NCAA Super Regional Qualifier Christopher Newport, NCAA Super Regional Qualifier Lynchburg, and two victories over national championship qualifier Randolph-Macon.
Dowdy hopes to major in elementary education.at Emory & Henry.
