
Gibbs High School senior Lacey Keck is the 2025 KOC & 5Star Preps Softball Player of the Year. She led Gibbs to a second consecutive Class 3A state championship.
BY NOAH TAYLOR
Lacey Keck remembers the home run she gave up her freshman year.
In a tournament in Hendersonville four years ago, the young Gibbs’ pitcher went up against several Division I-bound hitters and held her own. The lone run she allowed was the deciding one, but the performance taught Keck something about herself.
“I think that really helped me realize that I could compete at that level,” Keck said.
The 5Star Preps Softball Player of the Year for the second-straight year competed at the highest levels throughout her career, helping the Lady Eagles to back-to-back TSSAA Class 3A State Championships in 2024 and 2025 as a left-handed pitcher and hitter.
Keck, who is set to play at Carson-Newman next season, was 37-2 as a starter her senior season, finishing with a 1.06 ERA after tossing 208 strikeouts in 218.2 innings. At the plate, she batted .440 and totaled 56 RBIs.
In a fitting finish to Keck’s career in Gibbs’ most recent title triumph in May, she was the hero — twice.
It was Keck, deep into extra innings against DeKalb County that pulled off the escape in a 10th-inning jam. It was Keck, with a runner in scoring position the following frame, that finished off a 1-0 win with a walk-off hit.
Carol Mitchell had grown accustomed to witnessing those kinds of heroics. She coached Keck in middle school and in her four seasons at Gibbs. But even she couldn’t have scripted her final game any better.
“We were in the perfect spot in our lineup,” Mitchell said. “I think everybody just knew we were going to win the game … It was kind of a perfect scenario for us.”
Keck pitched wire-to-wire, allowing just four hits and striking out five. She struggled in most of her at-bats that afternoon, but shrugged it off. She came through when it mattered most.
And in a poetic ending, where she once realized her potential in a one-run loss four years earlier, she was putting the finishing touch on a remarkable run with the final hit in a one-run victory.
“We talked before the season about personal goals, but team goals, also,” Keck said. “We’d talk about it over the course of the season. I feel like that really helped me and my teammates really dial in to what our main goal was.”
Repeating as state champions was talked about long before Gibbs stepped on the field. Keck remembers the coaches bringing it up in summer workouts, and again in preseason meetings. It was talked about in practice and before and after games.
It became the team mantra, the rallying cry throughout their 2025 campaign, which included a commanding 40-3 record and a perfect 10-0 mark in District 4-3A play. And at no point did it add too much weight. It was embraced.
“Everyday, one of our goals was to say, ‘I’m going to win state,’” Keck said. “We said it everyday, and it put it in our head that we were going to accomplish that.”
Having players like Keck provides that kind of confidence.
Keck never gave her team or coaches any reason not to be confident when she was in the circle or in the batter’s box. Not in middle school. Not as a freshman. Not in the state championship game.
“She just had that it-factor, that kind of charisma,” Mitchell said. “That confidence that you would want in your pitcher and one of the leaders on your team. … It’s always nice to see as a coach, a kid with that kind of confidence.”