By KEITH WALKER
For Potomac Local News
STAFFORD, Va. — The 30th anniversary of the state championship the Stafford High School Girls Softball Team won in 1982 came and went without remark or notice.
Even some of the women who played on the team let the day slip by.
But late last year, Gary Quintero, a member of the team’s boosters club, noticed a banner denoting the win high in the rafters of the school’s gym and wondered why no one remembered in 2012 to commemorate the feat from 1982.
He asked around and it turned out that people just didn’t remember the winning team, so he decided to put together a ceremony even though it would be a year late in coming.
“It was a state championship team and there’s not that many in a lot of high schools” Quintero said. “It was the first ever championship ever in Stafford High School’s history.”
The women who were champions as girls, met again Wednesday at the Stafford Indians softball field where they hugged, laughed, looked at old scrapbooks and reminisced about the glory days.
Paula Schenemann, whose last name was Jett in 1982, said the best part of the ceremony was seeing everyone.
Ginger Wible, whose name was Ginger Cooper when she played as a sophomore, said winning the state championship win didn’t “sink in” until the following season.
“It was like, ‘Man, where do we go now?’” Wible said.
While she thought the ceremony was “awesome,” Wible said these days the win is a memory that only pops up occasionally.
“I think now, it’s just something that happened 30 years ago,” Wible
But the thing that happened in 1982 forged long-term friendships, Wible said.
“All of us are still in this area. We’re all still friends. We all still keep in touch,” Wible said.
Marla Brown-Carpenter, who played on the team as a freshman, was also pleased to receive the belated recognition.
“I didn’t think about it on the 30th, but I’m glad that they put this together,” she said.
Looking back on it and remembering, Brown Carpenter said the 2-0 win against Hanover County’s Lee Davis High School was “a great feeling.”
Rene Thomas-Rizzo brought her son Ryan to the event.
Ryan Rizzo, a sophomore at Chantilly High School, said his mother talks about the championship win.
“She thinks she’s the stuff,” the 16-year-old Ryan said.
“I always try to make him wear my number,” Thomas-Rizzo said of her son who plays lacrosse, basketball and golf.
Lorie Carneal said while the win was “overwhelming” she remembered that the girls tossed their Coach Bernard ‘Bunny” Humphrey into the pond nest to the softball field.
“That pond’s not clean,” Carneal said.
During the ceremony, Stafford High School Athletic Director Wes Bergazzi, read a quote Humphrey reportedly gave to the Free-Lance Star newspaper after the championship win years ago.
His remarks seemed to sum up what it takes to win big.
“This team has played together. When somebody was down, somebody else picked up the slack,” the quote read.
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