On March 12, 2006, the Georgetown softball team beat Coppin State in the Capital Classic in Delaware.

It wasn’t the championship game. In fact, the Hoyas lost five out of six games that weekend by a total of 40 runs.

But it was the first victory in the history of the Georgetown softball program.

After years of rumors, Georgetown’s softball team, led by Head Coach Pat Conlan, finally became a Division I team in July 2005. Conlan had experience developing programs as she had just built the North Carolina State team from the ground up. However, doing the same at Georgetown proved to be a little more complicated.

“We were recruiting [at Georgetown] with no scholarship money,” Conlan said. “And when you’re looking to build a program essentially from scratch, that becomes a very difficult process of not just selling Georgetown because that’s the easy part. It was saying, ‘Ok, come to Georgetown, but pay your own way.’”

Compared to the situation at North Carolina State, where the athletic department allocated six scholarships for recruitment and hired the staff a whole year before the team began playing competitively, Conlan had her work cut out.

“When I got to campus, they said, ‘Ok, congratulations, you’re the new coach, and you’re going to have to have a team this year.’ And I said, ‘Have a team? I don’t have any players,’” Conlan recalled.

That’s where Lauren Camp Brennan (MSB ’06) came in. At the time, Brennan was president of Georgetown’s club softball team; she and her teammates were ready to try out for the newly established program.

“It was an opportunity for girls who were current students to play at least in the first year and try out to fulfill that dream of playing Division I softball, which is pretty awesome,” Brennan said.

“She says ‘Coach, I’ve got all the club kids ready to try out for the team,’” Conlan said. “So she passed along all their information to me and I communicated with them and then we were also able to send out a blast to all the incoming freshmen saying, ‘Hey if anybody’s interested in playing softball, we’re having tryouts.’”

During the summer of 2005, Christina Gallinari (MSB ’09) was about to start her freshman year. She had noticed that Georgetown didn’t have a softball team, and as a huge softball fan, she was disappointed she wouldn’t be able to see any games. She never imagined she might end up playing in them.

“At the bottom of an email it said, ‘Georgetown hires first softball coach.’ So I kind of thought to myself, this just seems like too much of a coincidence — I have to push through it,” Gallinari said. “So I actually emailed Coach Pat and I asked her if she was going to be holding tryouts, and she said she [would] in September and that I should come out.”

Conlan saw a lot of students like Brennan and Gallinari at those tryouts, kids who loved softball but never dreamed they’d have the chance to see their names on a Division I roster. She ended up with 16 players — all of them walk-ons — in the Georgetown softball team’s inaugural season.

“That team is very special to me,” Colan said. “All of those kids came to Georgetown because they loved Georgetown. … For them to have the opportunity to put Georgetown across their chest and wear that uniform was a tremendous pride for them.”

Gallinari joined the team, along with a handful of freshmen and several upperclassmen, including Brennan and a few of her teammates from the club team. Gallinari was ultimately the only member of her class to play for her entire time on the Hilltop, making her Georgetown’s first four-year letterman in softball.

The Hoyas played in 27 games in their first season, about half as many as an average season holds. They were not yet members of the Big East, and they called Guy Mason Field home, a Glover Park diamond surrounded by construction with an uneven outfield that provided a one-of-a-kind home-field advantage.

“Nobody could read the bumps like we could,” Gallinari said.

They practiced late at night, which invited a few unique visitors to the park. Once, a crew of firemen sat on top of their truck watching practice. Another time, a bachelor party showed up to run the bases.

Most of all it was a lot of hard work for the Hoyas, who lost six games before that first win against Coppin State.

“That first win that I got as a head coach at Georgetown with those kids was one of my greatest coaching experiences and one of my greatest coaching victories, and I’ve been a part of championships,” Conlan said. “You would have thought we won the national championship. For me, I’ll never forget that. Because at that moment it was like a stamp of approval that Georgetown was the right place for me to be.”

The Blue and Gray went on to win three more games that year, their inaugural record stood at 4-23 in a season when they had a lot of firsts — first hit, first run, first win and first shutout.

“Everything was special to us because it was the first thing that happened,” Gallinari said. “I think the thing that really set us apart as a team in that first year and beyond is that we never took anything for granted.”

Both Brennan and Gallinari are reluctant to take much credit for the team; instead, they praise Conlan for her efforts that transformed Georgetown softball and gave them unforgettable memories as student-athletes.

“Starting a team from scratch is not easy,” Gallinari said. “I think she deserves a lot of credit for being brave and taking the chance.”

Both still follow the team and attend games when they can — Brennan will be rooting on the Hoyas in Chicago this weekend when they play DePaul. Every May, the alumnae comeback to play the current team, pitching and hitting on Guy Mason Field like it’s 2006.

A lot has changed since that maiden campaign. The team joined the Big East for the 2009 season, which was an emotional moment for Conlan, who won four Big East Championships and set multiple conference records during her time as a student-athlete at Connecticut.

Last season, the Hoyas made the Big East tournament for the first time in program history, and this year they’re looking to win it; the team’s 7-2 conference record is good enough for second in the league.

For Conlan, it’s all a long way from holding tryouts just to field a team.

“We came from just nothing. I was recruiting kids on the picnic table outside of McDonough because I didn’t have an office. That was how our program started,” Conlan said. “There’re a lot of great memories, and we’ve come a long way. We still have a lot of work to do, but every year we get better and better. I’m excited not only about where this program has come from, but where it’s going.”