Jeremy Gill new head coach for Lady Wildcats softball
JEREMY GILL
His job is not to oversee a rebuild, and he’s not starting from scratch, but he’s not far from it as he’ll be the team’s third coach in three years.
The Lady Wildcats have never achieved success on the softball diamond, and they’ve always finished either last or next to last in the district standings.
“I’ve been coaching for 20-something years and Oak Ridge has never had a program that could compete,” said Gill, who has deep roots in softball in Anderson County.
He’s coached at Anderson County High School and worked with the city of Clinton’s youth recreation program and at Clinton High School.
Oak Ridge High School has never had a great record for softball.
“They’ve never really had a good feeder program, so the girls play other sports like soccer and basketball,” Gill said. “The Boys and Girls Club had baseball, so the girls who were interested in softball played baseball.
“And their rec league’s really struggled and they just weren’t getting girls interested in softball.”
Gill, who was tapped to replace Lisa Shipley as head coach last summer, knows a little bit about building a high school softball program.
For the last four seasons, he’s worked as an assistant coach at Knoxville’s Fulton High School where he and then-head Coach Brian Cochran took a dormant program and built a team that made it to the regionals.
“At Fulton, I coached on a team like this and we (eventually) made it to the region,” Gill said.
Cochran also left North Knoxville following the 2023 season and is now working as Gill’s assistant for the Lady Wildcats.
“Brian came over here with me,” Gill said.
Gill and Cochran came to Oak Ridge on June 1, and immediately began putting things into place, and they didn’t start at the high school.
“The first thing I did when I got the job ... was to put together a middle school program, and they played in a 38-team league,” Gill said.
In its division, Oak Ridge played 17 games and finished with a more-than-respectable 12-5 record.
The Lady Wildcats had 17 players on the team during the preseason, and Gill said he’s been impressed with the players for their willingness to work and learn since he arrived.
“We’ve got 17 girls on the team and (during the offseason), they’ve been coming in and they’ve been working really hard,” he said. “We were coming in after school and we were working three days a week.
“This team is totally different than what I heard about last year’s team. They’re working hard and they’re all working together,”
Again, things won’t be easy for the Lady Wildcats this year as they face a tough District 3-4A schedule against the likes of Knoxville Halls, Knox Central, Powell Karns and Campbell County.
“We’re probably going to take our lumps, but we’re going to continue to work and stay together,” he said. “When I was at Clinton in 2016 and 2017, Gibbs (which has long been out of the district) and Powell won the state championship.”