Fort Mill softball’s coach and ‘country scrapper’ retires as a state champion

About a month ago, Chuck Stegall stepped out of his team’s dugout and looked up at the stadium lights.

It was a balmy Friday night — the kind of night Stegall had grown accustomed to over his 22 years as head coach of the Fort Mill softball program. He’d just witnessed his team use a 13-run sixth inning to mercy-rule rival Nation Ford on the road in the last regular-season game of 2022.

The win clinched a Fort Mill softball region championship. But it also closed a chapter.

“Man, this is my last regular season game,” Stegall said that night in April. He was wearing his trademark bright Fort Mill yellow polo, white cap and easy grin, and his eyes were bouncing around the field as he talked, as if they were searching for stories and memories and emotions.

“The playoffs are going to be fun,” he continued, “but they’re going to be bittersweet.”

Stegall’s final game of his high school coaching career was on Friday night in Blythewood. It was a 4-2 Fort Mill win that delivered the school its first state championship in program history.

That win came after a lot of “fun,” just as Stegall predicted. It arrived after three District bracket wins, three Upper State bracket wins and several impromptu ice baths. It came after he kept a particular promise, one that stipulated that Stegall dye his hair royal blue ahead of the state championship series. And it was a direct result of two redemptive state championship series wins after what seemed like a debilitating Game 1 loss.

And just as Stegall predicted, his team’s playoff run to the top was bittersweet for him, too.

Because it’s the last playoff run he’ll have.

Stegall will officially end his prep coaching career after he coaches in the North-South All-Star game in June. He’s retiring because of his general health, he told The Herald last month — because of an aching back and aching knees and other issues that’s preventing him from sitting on buckets in high school softball dugouts for the rest of his life, which is what he might’ve chosen to do otherwise.

He’ll leave his post with a rich legacy, one riddled with region championships and six straight district championships and one state championship.

But Stegall will also leave a legacy based on who he is.

Stegall grew up in Fort Mill. Both sides of his family had lived in Fort Mill for generations, he said.

In an era when his hometown is growing and changing faster than ever before — when Fort Mill School District schools seemingly can’t get built fast enough — Stegall proudly hasn’t changed all that much.

He described this year’s team as “country scrappy” — affectionately calling them hungry and hard workers and a group that follows a simple maxim: “You do what you gotta do, when you gotta do it.”

“Fort Mill used to be country, and we did things that we’d say city folks don’t do,” Stegall said with his Southern drawl and a chuckle. He added, “The part about scrappy is this: I believe that if you’re going to play the game, you play it at 110%. You don’t ever leave anything in your bag, or any regrets on the field. ... And that’s just being a country scrapper. You get in, and you do what you gotta do.”

People who’ve spent time around him say that part of Stegall had always been reflected in the teams he coached.

“They’ve sorta taken on his personality,” Fort Mill athletic director Dwayne Hartsoe told The Herald on Friday. “Scrappy team. They started playing really well at the right time of the year.”

Hartsoe added: “He loves the kids. The kids love him. He’s continuously working at the game, working at the field. It’s just awesome to see him go out like this as a state champion.”

John Turner, who broadcasts about as many Fort Mill sporting events as humanly possible and has gotten to know Stegall well over the years, said Stegall built Fort Mill softball into what it is.

“What does Chuck mean to Fort Mill? He is Fort Mill,” Turner wrote in a Twitter direct message in the wee hours of Saturday morning. He added, “People come and go from FMHS, but Chuck is one of the last of a generation who shaped what people see today. Taking a program next to nothing and building an actual program. ... He will give the players all the credit, but tonight is a culmination of all his hard work. He’s a true gentleman, and now he’s a champion.”

Stegall’s players wanted the title for him, too.

“I’m just so happy that we can give him this in his last year,” said Maddie Drerup, Fort Mill’s starting senior pitcher and USC Upstate signee. “He’s been doing this for 20-something years now, and to see his face when he won that championship trophy is pretty special.”

Before the playoff run, on that aforementioned Friday night in April, Stegall struggled to articulate how he felt. “You get that feeling,” he said, looking around the field with a smile. “You get that feeling.”

Maybe that feeling was excitement. Maybe that feeling was optimism — the hope that he could do something he’d never before done after all these years.

Whatever the feeling was, it was surely validated on Friday.

“There were times when I sat down with my athletic director frustrated because we didn’t get over that little hump,” Stegall said with a state championship trophy in his hand. “And he calmed me down a couple times and said, ‘Coach, you’re doing a good job. It’ll happen. It’ll happen.’”

Stegall then laughed: “I hate to say it, but he was right.”