SEAGRAVES: Remembering Jill

Published 11:39 am Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Twenty-nine years ago on March 23 I took an incredible group of young men to play in the Oconee Middle School Conference baseball tournament. They were really good. I just drove the bus, handed in the lineup card and watched them play. I had a really young assistant coach named Jon Cawley, who in reality did most of the work! This team went undefeated in the regular season and then lost in the first round of the tournament.

It was double elimination, and it was going to be hard, if not impossible, to play our way back to the top. We did it, but we absolutely exhausted our pitching … everyone who pitched during the regular season pitched to get us to the championship game against our rival at the time, East Laurens Middle School. We had to beat them twice and had no chance of doing so.

Somehow we won the first game, and before that final game I took the boys down the right field line to give them my win one for the Gipper speech … I reminded them of the history and the heritage we carried into the gam … how good they were … and they should just go have fun, cause I didn’t know who was going to pitch.

Andrew Dunn, a sixth-grader, ran toward the dugout yelling, “Remember the Alamo!” What a speech!

Charlie Smith, our best pitcher, started and got rocked … .it was 11-1 as we entered the fifth and if we didn’t score, we would have been run ruled.

My starting shortstop, T.J. Carswell, who hadn’t pitched all year, came on in the second inning and stopped East Laurens cold. We just couldn’t score, but scratched out a couple of runs in the fifth to avoid an early end to our night and went on to play the sixth and seventh innings still down by a bunch. T.J. pitched his heart out and gave up nothing. Doggone if those guys didn’t come back and win!!!

We celebrated as those who do something incredible do … everyone wearing red and black was ecstatic. The first and only time I took the Gatorade shower and Corey New dropped the cooler on my head … I didn’t care!

We arrived in Milledgeville late Saturday night and found way too many cars parked at the Cordell Events Center. Someone, I don’t know who, walked up to me and said these words, “Jill was killed this afternoon.”

Jill Stewart was a freshman at GMC Prep School in 1996.

My heart broke. Jill, beautiful, sweet, everyone’s friend … had been killed in a car accident. We cried together and went home … there was little else to do.

I sit here today, and I type through my tears … tears of joy over the memories I share with that group of guys, tears of sorrow over a life cut way too short, tears of gratitude for allowing me and so many others the opportunity to know and love Jill.

Tears today because tomorrow morning (Monday) I’ll do what I normally do on this day .… spend a few minutes with Jill at her tree on campus and place some flowers there to let her and Randy and Susan (her parents) know that she is not forgotten.

Twenty-nine years, you would think it would grow easier for a much older, maybe a little more cynical man when he thinks about this day … it doesn’t.

—Scott Seagraves is a retired GMC Prep educator. His column appears occasionally in The Union-Recorder.