I don’t think you really know how bad it could get. We have been blessed to have been fans of a team that was at the top rung of the Big Ten for the past 10 years, enough so to go to NCAA tournaments each of those years.
Imagine we become more like Penn State has been. That is not impossible.
I was referring to controlling an entire game only to allow five runs in the bottom of the seventh to lose in dramatic fashion, not the state of the program. I’m still bullish there.
I have been following Gopher softball since I worked for the U as a grad student and traveled with the team to their first NCAA tournament in Tucson when Mike Candrea was a young coach just starting to build Arizona into the sofrball powerhouse it would eventually become.
I remember that even though Arizona’s facilities at the time were worse than Minnesota’s, with no permanent seating, no press box or facilities, I was so impressed with Candrea and the entire Arizona softball staff. They ran a first class operation even though interest in softball at that time was almost nonexistent.
Minnesota softball under Linda Wells was generally successful at a time when softball still pretty much a regional endeavor. Then Wells left for Arizona State, where she became a Hall of Fame coach. That might have been a wake up call for us, and we entered a brief period where we invested in facilities and a big name coach in Teresa Wilson, who was reigning PAC-12 Coach of the Year and had just taken Oregon to the WCWS. Post-Minnesota, Wilson would take Washington to six WCWS before a prescription drug scandal derailed her career.
Under Wells and Wilson, we won three B1G regular season titles in six years. It appeared Minnesota softball was in a good place. Fans and donors were excited. We raised the money to build Jane Sage Cowles. Little did we know at the time, but Wilson’s 1991 title would be our last one for 26 years.
It was after Wilson left and the new facilities were in place that we became somewhat complacent. Bernstein and Standering are good softball people (with ties to the aforementioned first class Arizona program). They won just enough to keep the wolves at bay (five NCAA appearances and one B1G tournament championship in 19 seasons)
but nothing that would really take Minnesota softball to the next level. For whatever reason, they couldn’t field comsistently competitive teams and a few of their teams, particularly toward the end of their tenure, were downright horrible.
Then we got lucky. By this time, we were no longer going after big name coaches. We took a chance on a young coach with no previous head coaching experience. Those kinds of hires have maybe a 10% chance of working out at all. But this time, we hit the jackpot.
This coach took a program that had been on the skids and had no built-in advantages and ushered in a Golden Era of Minnesota softball, culminating with a #1 ranking in 2017 and laying the groundwork for our first WCWS appearance (although sadly, thanks in part to the infamous NCAA snub which undoubtedly left her questioning whether she would ever be able to accomplish her goal of winning a national championship here, she wasn’t around to enjoy that run).
So yes, I know exactly how bad it could get if the administration becomes too complacent. But right now, thanks to the Golden Era, interest in Minnesota softball remains high, and the WCWS run proves that it can be done here if the right ingredients are in place.
We do need to make some investments in facilities and in this era, NIL or we will have no chance of attracting and retaining the kind of pitching in particular that we will need to keep building on the winning tradition that we’ve established here over the last decade.
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