Extra Innings Softball News: Meet Our Newest Writer & Contributor… Will Turner!

As Extra Inning Softball continues to grow and expand—we’ve never been bigger and stronger since we started in January 2017—we’re excited to add new contributing talent to our roster and today we introduce you to a name, face and voice you’ll be seeing a lot of on our site: Will Turner from Tampa, Florida.

Will has an extensive background and not just in covering softball (although he’s great at that, obviously!); he also covers college and high school football, basketball and much more.

As most of you know, we’re down a man right now with our Editor and friend Carlos Arias recovering from a stroke suffered a few weeks ago (we’re happy to report he’s slowing getting better and we’re so grateful for all your thoughts and prayers helping to direct him towards recovery and a return to covering our sport!).

Still, it’s always been our plan to get bigger and better in the softball space and we are able to add more talent and coverage as we move forward. Will is one of those many steps and we’ll have more news coming shortly!

Below, we’re handing the keyboard to him to detail his background and explain how “softball has changed my life.”

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Shoot, where does the story begin?

Well, I guess I should say who I am. My name is Will Turner – which I feel is redundant since you’ll see it at the end of the article – and I’m thrilled to be joining the Extra Inning Softball team as a national contributor.

Thanks to Brentt for the opportunity and I’m extremely grateful for a chance to make an even bigger impact on the softball community.

So, how’d I get here?

Sometimes I have to ask myself that same question, because it’s been a wild ride!

I wrote for my school newspaper in Riverview, Fla., and started professionally my junior year – I was 16 (a baby!) – for Big County Preps, a high school football website in the Tampa Bay area.

I stayed there for about a year and a half and wrote for FLRunners.com my senior year of high school in 2017 and graduated high school with an FHSAA Football, Basketball and Track and Field State Finals under my belt, something I was extremely proud and grateful for moving forward.

I started at the University of South Florida in August 2017 and moved to FloridaHSFootball.com, providing Tampa area coverage for a statewide brand – again, just another opportunity that I’m still eternally grateful for.f

But the opportunity that really helped with everything came that spring. A good friend of mine, Jarrett Guthrie, was getting ready for his first full season covering high school baseball in Hillsborough County (mainly Tampa schools) with his site, 813Preps.

Here’s why the opportunity changed my life: 813Preps provided consistent, every day, in-person coverage of a sport that set an example in the Bay Area. That made me want to do the same, but for all sports.

I created WTurner Productions (WTP), my personal high school sports website in Tampa Bay, with a goal to cover as many sports as possible well. From football, to volleyball, to basketball and everything in between.

The problem with that – there’s 120-plus schools to cover. That’s a lot of time, and a lot of money needed to make it worthwhile.

You’re probably wondering where the softball part comes in.

I covered football under the WTP brand in 2018, and I was looking for something else to cover for the spring. I’ll never forget how the idea came about. I was dealing with some personal issues in late January that made me wonder if what I was doing was worth it.

Jarrett and I had lunch at Dunderbak’s, a good German restaurant near the University of South Florida. Over some potato pancakes, he brought up the idea of covering softball, since softball coverage in the Bay Area was declining after the Tampa Tribune was bought by the Tampa Bay Times and the Times wasn’t nearly providing the fastpitch softball coverage it once did.

I covered 50 high school games under the WTP brand in 2019 and chose to make softball the anchor of my coverage.

In addition to that, I added USF coverage to my arsenal, working for SoFloBulls and The Daily Stampede in the 2018-19 athletic year before joining on with Bulls247 in August ’19.

I’m eternally grateful for Nate Bond of TDS for linking me up with the 247Sports crew to get going there and am getting close to beginning my third year of coverage with the site in mid-August.

Back on the high school side, the second year of WTP focused on volleyball and football, adding some fellow college students onto the staff, creating some great relationships with some friends I love dearly.

But there came a breaking point.I was on the way to a region volleyball game and I was beginning to nod off behind the wheel on I-75. I snapped myself out of it, looked in the rearview mirror and asked myself:

“What are you doing?”

My volleyball stories or other sports stories were getting little (as in single-digit) views. Why risk a potentially life-threatening accident for that? Time to make a business decision.

Long story short, I never covered another volleyball game – rebranded WTP to Bay Made Fastpitch and devoted myself to covering high school softball in the Tampa Bay area.

The sport has changed my life.

The community is amazing, the community is growing, and I’ve met more incredible people in my three years of covering fastpitch softball than I have in any other sport in my five years.

Softball in Tampa Bay was starved for coverage, and I was proud and grateful to have a platform to be able to follow the example that Jarrett and 813Preps followed for a truly amazing sport.

I’ve covered everything from the Kissimmee Klassic to four FHSAA State Football Finals to two American Athletic Conference basketball tournaments to a football game at Notre Dame Stadium to a NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.

And through all of it, softball continues to reign supreme in my heart and in my mind.

I’m excited to get to work and to continue to grow the sport within Florida and across the country.

— Will Turner

Some acknowledgements: Thanks to Hasani Harper and JJ Garrett for always being my guys, Olivia Cuellar, Jarrett Guthrie, Ally Ledenham and Rachelle Gardow, Jill Young, Gordy Cordoves, M.A. Fultz, Ed Gallio and Joel Stephens, the Slaters, Greg Feldman, TJ Goelz, among many, many others for helping support and making this dream come to life.