Green Bay Reporter

Kaukauna Ghosts softball's path to winning the WIAA Division 1 State Championship late last month hasn't been easy and their coach is hopeful they'll do it again next year.

Tim Roehrig, Kaukauna Area School District social studies teacher and head coach for the Ghosts, said he and the team were determined to get there – and they did, defeating Sun Prairie 1-0  at King Park on the UW-Green Bay campus on June 30.

"Life isn’t always easy," Roehrig said in a We Are Green Bay news story published the same day. "These girls have battled through so much and we have talked about this moment. When they were five, we pulled them out on the field and I said I’m going to coach you until you win a state championship. We just did it. That’s big. That’s big.”

It was the Ghosts' third championship for their program, with previous wins in 2010 and 2017.

Team pitcher Skylar Calmes told WBAY ABC 2 that the win left her "kind of just speechless."

"It's unbelievable," Calmes, who threw the last pitch in the game, said in WBAY news story. "This has been our goal all year and to finally actually accomplish it, it’s kind of almost unbelievable. If you can believe it.”

It was the team’s hard work that paid off, Calmes said.

"We put in so much work,” she said. “So much work through the offseason and through the season just to even make it here. So to even make it here and to win it – it's just such an accomplishment."

Calmes also took to social media to recognize the milestone.

"Not only did I finish my junior year of high school season a state champion, I also finished with a 15-0 record as a pitcher with a 1.44 ERA, 87 1/3 innings pitched, 64 H, 30 R, 18 ER and 26 BB," she said in a Twitter post a few days after the big win.

With eight starters planning to return in the 2022 season, they hope to do it again next year, Roehrig told another news outlet.

"We have some really good classes coming in, we have some really good players on our JV team, we have some really good eighth graders coming in, so we have a lot of girls looking at that one spot or two spots," Roehrig told Fox 11 News.