For Coach McKnight, Softball Is About More Than the Game

By Greg Ritchie
Messenger Reporter

HOUSTON COUNTY – Roger McKnight has been coaching softball for nearly 25 years, but the work began with a simple reason: His daughters wanted to play.

McKnight was raised in Nacogdoches, earned an undergraduate degree in business from Stephen F. Austin State University and later returned for a master’s degree. He worked in his family’s businesses, served for several years as a youth minister at a Methodist church and eventually found his way into coaching through his daughters’ activities.

“I couldn’t help with ballet,” McKnight said. “I could help with softball and volleyball and things of that nature.”

He began coaching softball, initially helping his daughters and the girls who played alongside them. When his daughters graduated, the players he had coached with them asked him to continue.

“When my girls graduated, the girls that I was coaching with them wanted me to stay,” he said. “So I did, and now I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years.”

The work has taken McKnight well beyond the local softball field. His Nitro team competes ir raveling tournaments, with a current emphasis on college-exposure events. At those tournaments, college coaches watch players compete, review their statistics and learn more about their academic plans.

The goal, McKnight said, is to help each player find a college that fits both her athletic ability and her future plans.

“The girls hand in their stats information and what they want to major in,” he said. “They start realizing, This is the school I want to go to because they’re going to offer what I want to do, but they will also offer me a chance to play the sport that I love.”

The team is not a league, McKnight explained, but a traveling softball program that competes in tournaments organized by groups such as USA Softball, USSSA and FASA. In earlier years, Nitro pursued national championships through those organizations. Now, McKnight said, the focus is primarily on helping players reach the next level.

“We’ve gotten away from trying to go to all these nationals and just focus on finding out what the girls want to do,” he said.

That approach has produced opportunities for many of the players McKnight has coached. He said more than 100 girls have received college softball scholarships, while he knows of more than 50 others who received scholarship offers but chose to pursue something else.

McKnight’s youngest daughter received scholarship offers but ultimately decided to attend preveterinary school.

That kind of decision is part of what McKnight believes coaching should be about. The goal is not simply to keep players on the field. It is to help them understand their choices and pursue the future they want.