With the winter sport season wrapping up, head coach of the Fountain Hills High School softball team, Randy Bragg, has noticed he is not the only one who is excited for the spring season.

“The girls are excited; very excited,” Bragg said. “It is very refreshing to be in the hallways before the season and have girls say, ‘I can’t wait for the season to start.’ That means more to me, really, than anything.”

The FHHS softball season kicks off today, Feb. 20, with a home game against Snowflake starting at 3:15 p.m. at Fountain Hills Middle School.

For the new season the Falcons have updated their rooster with freshmen players and a standout senior player.

“We are still really young,” Bragg said. “We added a really key senior, though; Jenn Stricker, who should have been playing for the last four years, I told her. She is a real leader so that was a big pick up for us.”

The freshmen players on the team might be young but they bring a lot of experience that Bragg has found to be useful.

“Every one of the freshmen played in middle school with coach [Bill] Nye,” Bragg said. “There are also a couple of club players. What has been fun for me at practice is, I can tell one of them to go from third and play right field and they can do it. I have so many interchangeable parts now that I didn’t have last season.”

Along with the new talent, the Lady Falcons also have key players Sophia Buckley, Sydney Loyet and big hitter Gabbi Coughlin.

FHHS softball also has the benefit this season of playing in a new region, where teams more or less start on an even footing.

“It is kind of hard to tell how we stack up by just looking at the other teams’ past records from their previous region,” Bragg said. “It is really impossible to see where we fit in. I believe that we should be able to make a run at the playoffs this year with the talent that has come up from the middle school.”

Getting his team ready to make that run to the playoff, Bragg feels his biggest task is to get the players to believe in themselves.

“Confidence is going to be a big problem,” Bragg said. “It is good to want to be out there every day, but you need to know that you are a good player. So that is going to be on me, to help them understand they are a good team and can compete with the best teams in 3A.”