When Daryl Hoelting accepted the position as the head softball coach at Salina South High School before the 1991 season, he did it having never even seen a high school softball game in his life.
Kind of hard to believe considering the Olpe native has done nothing but win since the day he became South’s very first head softball coach some 17 years ago.
“The year I took the job at South, I went home over spring break, and I noticed in the paper that Hayden and Emporia High were playing softball that day. I decided to run up and watch a game,” Hoelting said. “I drove up from Olpe to Emporia and watched my first high school softball game there in Emporia.”
Hoelting was just named the 2007 Kansas Coaches Association softball coach of the year — his second such honor — after winning his fifth state championship in 16 seasons as a high school softball coach.
He spent the last three years as the skipper at Sacred Heart in Salina, winning State titles all three years with a combined 70-1 record and setting a state record with a 68-game winning streak, which will continue into next season.
He retired from coaching at Sacred Heart after this past season, but before that, he was the head coach at South for 13 seasons, compiling a 265-37 record that included two Class 5A State titles and another four State runner-up finishes before he abruptly retired after the 2003 season.
“It’s just been a fabulous run,” Hoelting said. “I know everybody talks about the 68-game winning streak that we ended with this year, and the State titles too. We never once put pressure on our kids to win ballgames. We never talked about winning — we talked about playing the best that we could possibly play and trying to get better every time we took the field.
“The luckiest thing for me is I’ve always had great assistants and I’ve always had kids that had a passion to play the game.”
It’s a far cry from when he witnessed his first high school softball game — a matchup between Emporia High and Hayden at Whittier Park back in 1990.
Though he grew up a baseball fan and player, Hoelting said he never thought much about softball until the day he was approached by the administration at Salina South to lead it’s newly established squad.
“When they (Salina South) were looking for a softball coach, I said, ‘You know, I’d like to do that,’” he said. “And of course, I had never attended a high school softball game in my life.”
The results came faster than expected, as Salina South went 17-6 in Hoelting’s first year leading the program.
And now, after years of winning with the sport, Hoelting said the difference between his first love — baseball — and the sport he said he had “a strong passion for” are not as great as one might think.
“I played baseball in Olpe, and then I went to junior college out of high school to play college baseball,” he said. “It was just always something I grew up around and with. There’s a lot of similarities between baseball and softball.”
Hoelting credited an often clichéd but nevertheless reliable method when coaching his players — he simply wanted them to get better every day.
His practices were designed to flow in stations, from pitching to hitting to fielding to bunting, all with the idea in mind that working harder and improving each day would eventually yield results.
It is a trait he said was instilled in him when he was growing up on his parents’ dairy farm in Olpe.
“The only way we were going to get better every day was if we worked at it every day,” Hoelting said. “I learned how to work hard at a young age. When you milk cows every morning and every night all the while going through school, you learn how to work hard.”
But now he has decided to step away from coaching, and many have questioned his decision to retire after so much success.
But his daughter, Tracy, will be a senior at Sacred Heart this next year, his youngest son, David, will be a freshman this fall and his oldest son, Kyle, will be leaving in a week to become a nuclear engineer with the Navy.
Spending as much time as possible with his children and his wife, Kim, as well as his parents, N.A. and Mary Hoelting, who still live in Olpe, was the main reason why he decided to leave despite being on top of the Kansas softball world.
“When I retired from South in 2003 after we won 5A State, I had three teenagers running around the house, and that was the primary reason. I just couldn’t get to all their stuff,” he said. “When Sacred Heart approached me and asked me if I’d be interested, I said I would help them out for a year or two until they found somebody. Three years later, they hadn’t found anybody, and I was still chasing around three teenage kids trying to get to all their stuff.
“To borrow a saying from Olpe from my dad — I had too many irons in the fire.”
Hoelting doesn’t rule out an eventual return to Olpe and the Lyon County area. He still owns 40 acres of land east of Olpe, and in fact, he’ll be back in town this weekend for a family reunion.
“I’ve always loved that part of the country — Lyon County,” he said. “I have a lot of fond memories back there. I attribute a lot of my success and a lot of my passion and not being afraid of hard work to what I learned growing up in Olpe.”
He’ll have come full circle once the softball season begins next spring. He’ll be watching from the stands as Tracy tries to help lead Sacred Heart to a fourth straight State title. He’ll be watching just like he did that day at Whittier Park 17 years ago, only this time, he’ll have seen his fair share of softball games.
“I still really can’t believe it, and it seemed like it happened so fast,” Hoelting said. “We worked hard though, and that’s always something I tried to do as a coach. Every day, every year, I just wanted us to try to get better at something than we were the day before.”