Brininger named All-metro softball COTY
Cardington skipper built Pirates into contenders
At the end of each softball season, Cardington coach Tod Brininger and his assistant coach Allen Adams decide if they’re going to return the following year. Year after year, the answer remains yes.
Brininger, now at the end of his 12th season leading the Pirates, has built the Cardington softball program into a perennial contender in Division III with four appearances in the state final four since 2017. This year, the Pirates were the No. 2 team in the state before falling to
No. 1 Wheelersburg in the state semifinals. Brininger was selected as the Dispatch’s All-metro softball coach of the year for his efforts.
The competitive aspect of coaching is just a small part of why Brininger continues to coach at the high school level.
“We talk about a lot of things other than softball, quite frankly, to try to encourage them to be independent, strong young women,” Brininger said. “I think that’s the most important thing I do as a high school coach, to try to give them a little bit moving forward that they can rely on when they’re in times of adversity and things like that.”
In the early part of each season, Brininger
often leans on classroom sessions filled with quotes to bring his team together and lay the groundwork for the way they’ll approach the season. When they take the field, practices are, in Brininger’s words, “pretty difficult”, as he and Adams work toward their goal of setting the players up to make their own decisions.
If they’re successful — and they usually are, as evidenced by the Pirates’ success in recent years — games are run by the players, with minimal coaching input from Brininger.
“We do a lot of our coaching in practice,” Brininger said. “It’s empowering the players to let them play and make the decisions, just react in the moment and try to do the best they can . ... We put a lot of power and a lot of decision-making in their hands about what to do. Hopefully, that translates into making them the best people they can be when they leave us.”
And as long as Brininger continues to see that commitment from his players, he’ll keep saying yes at the end of each season.
“When the kids still have the desire and the drive to not only succeed on the softball field, but just to be good people and want to succeed, that’s what keeps us coming back,” Brininger said. “When we get to the point where we think we care more than the players do, that’s when we’re gonna hang it up . ... I love the competition. That’s definitely part of the reason why we do it, but we wouldn’t do that if we didn’t have the players we cared about.”