Blog: Taylor Pannell’s Summer Gets Serious Starting This Weekend

One of our outstanding team of player bloggers is Taylor Pannell, an infielder from Milan, Illinois who plays for the Beverly Bandits 14U Futures team and a verbal commit to Auburn as of January 2018.

The speedy infielder is blogging for us as she chronicles what it takes individually and as a team to return to the fields in Southern California for the PGF 14U National Championship.

Taylor is one of the Top 10 players from the Extra Inning Sports Class of 2022 Elite 100 rankings  and we first met her in an Extra Star Power feature and since then she’s done a cool video slide show to the tune of “California Here We Come”, talked about why it’s so important to return to So Cal for the PGF Nationals and also the importance of role models (and how others feel she is one).

In today’s blog, she explains the importance of this weekend as the summer club season starts to get serious…

*****

I am Taylor Pannell, a 2022 Auburn commit and I play 3B/SS for the Beverly Bandits.

The past few weekends I have been with the Bandits spring team coached by Bill Conroy. The spring team is most of the players in the organization 13 years old and up that don’t play high school ball because they are too young or have their season in the fall.

I have been playing with girls on the 16U Bandits team and a couple of girls on the second year 14U team that are still 8th graders.

The Bandits spring team helped my game a lot because of the good coaching and the older players I had an opportunity to work with.

This past weekend we have finished up the spring league and this upcoming week we start our summer season with my normal 13U team. We are playing in Crown Point, Indiana to play in a PGF National Qualifier for Huntington Beach California.

If we get 1st or 2nd we get our bid to California.

This weekend will be my first weekend in a long time seeing most of my teammates because some of them were playing high school softball or injured. One of our pitchers had ankle surgery and hasn’t been back since the fall but now she’s fully recovered and back pitching.

This upcoming weekend is very important because the sooner we get our bid the more time my team and myself can focus on improving our skills for the Junior Sparkler in Colorado and the DeMarini Invitational Tournament.

This weekend is the next step of my team’s journey to PGF Nationals in Huntington Beach, California!