By:Chris Munzing
When the Long Island women's open softball team took the field at the recent Empire State Games in Buffalo, they were led by former high school standouts, college stars and women who had played the game for decades. And a 15-year-old second baseman from Lido Beach named Casey Fee.
Fee was the youngest player on a team made up of woman who in some cases were more than twice her age, but she held her own, winning a starting spot in the infield and batting ninth. She said she wasn't intimidated by the older players because she had been playing with older kids her whole life, having been on the varsity softball team at Long Beach High School since she was a freshman. Fee grew up playing baseball with the boys, and dreamed of playing for her favorite team, the Yankees. She has been a standout on every team she's played for.
Tryouts for the games were held at Molloy College and St. John the Baptist, tryouts the Long Beach High School junior called "intensive." There are two types of teams in most sports at the Empire Games, an open team and a scholastic team. Scholastic teams are made up of high school students, while the open teams comprise the best players in the region, regardless of age.
But in softball there was no scholastic team, so it was do or die for Fee, who wears Mickey Mantle's No. 7. She was so impressive at the tryouts that she was considered one of the elite, and joined the best softball players on Long Island. "It was fun -- it was different," said Fee of playing on the open squad. "One of my coaches was on the team."
Fee's mother, Donna, was ecstatic when she heard the news. "The honor of playing Empire is great," she said. "You can't sit there and not feel very proud to be a New Yorker and an American. I was very proud of her because I know the commitment that she has to it. She sets the bar high for herself."
Fee agreed with her mother, "Other girls just like to play the games; I dedicate my life to it," she said, adding that wreaking havoc on the basepaths is her favorite aspect of the game.
Though Fee was the youngest member of the team, she says she was treated just like any other teammate and felt very comfortable with her fellow players. "It was so different," she said. "You could learn new things and teach them new things, too." She credits her Long Island coach, Bob Houlihan, for creating an atmosphere in which everyone got along and learned as well. "Instead of him yelling at us, he made us better by telling us what to do," Fee said.
She also enjoyed the higher level of play at the games. "Everyone was hitting and everyone was making their plays," she said. Fee said that when a ball was hit, there wasn't any doubt that the correct play would be made. She made a few sparkling plays herself, earning a game ball for turning a sharply hit ground ball up the middle into a run-saving double-play.
The Long Island team finished fourth in the hard-fought open division, losing in the bronze medal game to Western by a score of 2-1. Fee hopes that the Long Beach High team, for which she leads off and plays second, won't meet a similar fate next spring. Long Beach was last season's New York State runner-up, and Fee is confident that this will be the year Long Beach wins it all.
She is unsure of where she will attend college, but said she's been told that there will be no shortage of college recruiters watching her play next spring. Fee, who also plays soccer and basketball for the school, hopes to be either a writer or a police detective.
For now, however, she is content to go on her computer, hang out with her friends at the beach and play the game she loves. She smiled as she recalled something her middle school coach, Leo Palacio, would say: "Nothing gets by Casey Fee, not even the wind."
