Having a ball

Entering third season, softball’s future looks bright

You can see the softball team during its first home stand this season: April 7, Loyola, 2 p.m.; April 8, Northeastern Illinois, 3 p.m.; April 10 and 11, Indiana, 1 p.m.

When she started four years ago, Gallagher didn’t even have a desk. Now she has a Big Ten contender.

The kick that comes from creation, the exhilaration that surges from forging the first foundation of a program, the satisfaction of knowing you are the absolute starting point of a timeline – few university coaches ever experience those joys of establishing a new athletic program.

One of them who has: Karen Gallagher, head softball coach at UW- Madison. She and her staff have created an entire program – players, bats, balls, gloves, uniforms, paper and pencils – from scratch. That Herculean task took off in a flurry of first-evers in 1994 when the Athletic Board approved softball as an interscholastic sport.

What Gallagher has done since then is what the coach of another new sport at UW–Madison – women’s ice hockey – must do before the 1999-2000 season opens (see sidebar). And if Gallagher’s effort is any clue, the new coach will face an emotional roller coaster ride and a work schedule bordering on cruel and inhuman — at least to start.

When Gallagher arrived at UW–Madison, after six seasons as assistant softball coach at the University of California-Berkeley, she faced a slate that was very, very blank. Blankness can be a blessing — no other messages to erase — but it also can be forbidding because, well, there’s so blasted much to “write.”

“Softball was my life for the first two years here,” says Gallagher. “I just had to devote myself to it day and night, and I ran the gamut of emotions, from excitement to frustration.”

For one thing, she had to recruit players – most of them now juniors – to play at a place with no interscholastic softball tradition. “We had no field at first and no current players to talk to,” she says.

Lace up the skates: Hockey is next Propelled by the popularity of the gold-medal Olympic team, women’s ice hockey will likely skate into UW’s varsity sports by 1999. In March, the planning and equity committee of the UW Athletic Board voted unanimously to recommend women’s ice hockey as a varsity sport. The recommendation will be forwarded April 17 to the full Athletic Board for final approval. A coach for the new sport would be hired by summer, and competition would begin during 1999-2000. More than 23,000 women played ice hockey competitively in 1996-97, a more-than-fourfold increase over the number of women players in 1990. Thirteen NCAA schools now compete in women’s ice hockey at the Division I level, and other schools, such as Ohio State, are adding the sport in the next two years. Women’s ice hockey has existed as a thriving club sport at UW- Madison since 1972. Part of the athletic department’s continuing effort to meet national collegiate gender-equity goals , the addition of ice hockey will bring the total number of women’s sports at Wisconsin to 12. Softball and lightweight rowing have been added as women’s varsity sports since 1994.

In other words, the recruits had to imagine what it would be like playing softball at UW–Madison. But Gallagher could point to the pleasure of making history, and many responded to that appeal.

One who did was center fielder Karen Bouchard of Green Bay, now in her third year with the team. “I’ve seen tremendous growth since we began,” she says. “At first we had no team leaders, but by the end of last season we learned what it feels like to win. Now we expect to win.”

Gallagher’s first year was a day-and-night stream of recruiting, meeting people on campus and getting physical facilities in order. On her first day, she found she had no phone or desk or even an office; at first the softball staff shared space in the women’s basketball office. But now they have their own offices, pencils and a spanking-new softball complex in the works.

For the opening season, a softball diamond was built near the Nielsen Tennis Stadium, but a stunning upgrade is on the way. Work begins in May on the Goodman Diamond, a complex featuring a redesigned field, dugouts, locker areas, players’ lounge, covered grandstand, press box, restrooms and concessions.

The $1.2 million project was bolstered by the lead gift of $500,000 from Bob and Erwin Goodman, longtime jewelers in Madison. “The Goodman Diamond will be one of the best softball facilities in the country,” says Gallagher.

She has high hopes for the first squad to step foot on the new diamond. Next year will be the first season that she and assistant coaches Robyn Burgess-Gon and Karyn Rice will be able to draw from four recruiting classes.

Playing mostly freshmen in 1996, the team posted a 14-39 season and placed last in the Big Ten. But last year, using just two recruiting classes, Wisconsin finished 34-25 and tied for sixth in the Big Ten. “This spring our goal is to make the Big Ten tournament, which takes the top four teams in the standings,” says Gallagher.

Looking forward is fun for a coach with a team on the rise, but looking back brings its own sweet rewards, says Gallagher with a smile: “I can pause a moment and remind myself, ‘Wow, we’re a contending Big Ten team.”

You can see the softball team during its first home stand this season: April 7, Loyola, 2 p.m.; April 8, Northeastern Illinois, 3 p.m.; April 10 and 11, Indiana, 1 p.m.