From the newspaper clippings in their “softball notebooks” to their rising anxiousness as the weekend approaches, it is clear that the members of Hoya softball understand the momentousness of Saturday’s morning matchup against George Washington.
At this weekend’s GW Fall Classic, Georgetown’s first-ever varsity softball team will take the field for the first time, just a few weeks after setting its inaugural 18-player roster, and just a few months after the hiring of Head Coach Pat Conlan.
The daily practices are serious. No longer a club team subsisting on occasional scrimmages, Georgetown softball has worked hard for the past two weeks. The team takes Tuesdays off but practices every other day, with 7 a.m. running on Wednesdays and Fridays, night skills training on Mondays and Thursdays, and morning practices each day of the weekend.
“It is a lot,” said third baseman Stephanie Sartori, one of two seniors on the team, “but that’s not necessarily a bad [thing]. For me, playing in Florida in high school, it was very regimented, and you practiced every day, so . I don’t have a problem with it.”
Then again, she added, “It is hard for me as a senior, since I’m so involved in other things.”
Club softball relied on twice-weekly practices at which attendance was decidedly optional – a system unfamiliar to accomplished high-school softballers like Sartori and fellow senior Lauren Camp, who served as president of the former club team. eanwhile, the varsity squad’s only opportunity for leeway comes in the form of a non-transferable “Get Out of Practice Free” card, awarded to Conlan’s players once a semester.
Conlan has also instituted a competition to see which player can assemble the most complete and accurate “softball notebook,” based on softball-themed documents that the head coach periodically provides the players.
The ingenuity of Conlan’s notebook represents a paradox essential to Georgetown’s approach over the last few weeks. While members of the team are working harder than ever before, the tone of practice allows for its share of laughter and, it appears, chemistry.
“They seem to be getting along marvelously,” Conlan said. “They’re a good group, a very funny group. . We’ve always got something to smile about.”
When the Hoyas aren’t running through their throwing progressions, practicing ground balls and fielding situations, working off the tee or scrimmaging, they’re often playing host to team dinners, getting to know new players over ice cream or showing potential recruits around campus.
Varsity softball is still very new to Georgetown. The inaugural season will be played without any recruited players. Guy Mason Field, a city park six blocks north of campus that now serves as the Hoyas’ home, still needs work. And when Conlan held tryouts on Sept. 17 and 18, a long-term commitment to the team was among her more important criteria for evaluating players.
“In the informational meeting and even in tryouts, I stressed the commitment [needed] to succeed at this level,” Conlan said. “To be part of us, this was not going to be a sometime thing; this was going to be an everyday thing. . When I chose the teams, I chose 18 kids who were going to be committed the same way I was committed.”
A mass e-mail to all female students at Georgetown, signs around campus and extensive contact with the existing club preceded Conlan’s Sept. 6 informational meeting, attended by 25 students. Two weeks and a great deal of skill testing later, the roster was official.
The final roster, in addition to Camp and Sartori, consists of five freshmen – Courtney Clark, Christina Gallinari, Katherine Incantalupo, Jennifer Wolf and Katie Zoch – seven sophomores – Christine Calabrese, Amanda Chase, Erin Doherty, Kat Lang, Anna McCann, Brittany Sonnichsen and Anna Wheatley – and four juniors – Brynn Marks, Liz Phillibert, Cathy Richter and Maggie Siller. The players’ field positions, in many cases, are still up in the air.
“Everybody probably feels like a freshman on the team because nobody really knows the coaches or how it all works yet,” freshman Courtney Clark said.
“I honestly don’t know who’s a freshman and who’s a sophomore,” Sartori said. “I never look at them as what grade they’re in. They’re my teammates.”
What the players do know is that Conlan and Assistant Coach Kim Staehle, whose hiring was announced July 20, were star teammates on a legendary University of Connecticut squad from 1990 to 1993. Each year, the Huskies were Big East champions and, in 1993, the team earned its first Women’s College World Series berth. UConn finished fifth, and Conlan was named Big East Pitcher of the Year.
“It’s great working with [Conlan],” Clark said, “because both she and Coach Staehle played together [and] know the game really well. . They have a lot to offer, and they’re just wonderful coaches.”
“We are all very eager to see Coach Pat maybe pitch sometime. We all want to see how that is,” Sartori said. “The first thing that really shows through Coach Pat and Coach Staehle [is that] they played together, so they know how they work and they get along well. . I’ve already noticed a huge difference [compared to] the club coach and my high school coaches, because they changed a lot of stuff that we were doing badly.”
One change is that Georgetown is recruiting for the first time. With the first-ever recruiting season freshly under way, Hoya coaches and players spent Sunday night at J. Paul’s over crab cakes with two high school seniors and their parents. Days before, they had earned their first-ever verbal commitment from a Georgetown recruit.
The players had “hosted a little team dinner for the recruits,” Conlan said, “and I think that played a major role . and kind of sealed the deal.”
Sartori has never found herself in such a big-sister position. Nor, for that matter, has she ever been on the recruit’s side of the table.
“I’m happy for them, because they actually get to come excited to play and knowing there’s a team here,” she said. “I’ve never been around a recruiting process before, so it’s interesting to see that, and it’s also something you have to take seriously, because you are representing Georgetown and Georgetown softball.”
As for the current squad, its greatest strength “is our attitude,” according to Conlan. “They’re a great group of girls and they’re excited to be a part of the program and excited to learn. I kind of describe them as sponges.”
The sponges face a shortened fall season that will include such opponents as Howard, Towson and UMBC, teams significantly more established than the nascent Hoyas.
As the weekend’s opener approaches, the players, though optimistic, “are a little anxious, honestly,” Sartori says. “I feel like we have a lot of work to do because we’ve had obviously only two weeks of practice, and many of these teams have been practicing with each other for more than a year.”
“I’m nervous – I’m sure we are all nervous – but I’m excited,” Clark adds. “It’ll be fun just to play another team and be competitive.”
Conlan describes the upcoming matches bluntly: “We’re gonna try to throw the kids to the wolves and see how they respond.”
This weekend, she’ll find out just how far chemistry can carry a newborn team.
