It’s been a wearisome ride for Georgetown softball.

For years, rumors of impending varsity status teased the club team. They brought hopes of enhanced competition, which would once and for all mean practices featuring an entire squad, and of leaving homely Volta Park, where runaway dogs and practicing little leaguers often conspired to kick a team of college students off their field.

“I was told that before my senior year, we would have a varsity team, and I kept hearing rumbles,” said senior third baseman Stephanie Sartori. “I still didn’t believe until we got a coach. Just because we had heard it so many times before, we kind of just blew it off.”

Indeed, it wasn’t until the hiring of Pat Conlan, Georgetown’s first varsity softball head coach, that the longtime fantasy was realized. On June 23, after years of discussion within the athletic department, the university formally named softball Georgetown’s 27th varsity sport.

The announcement closed the book on a months-long, semi-conspicuous coaching search that began in January. “We basically advertised nationally and locally, and also within the university . and we narrowed down a very large applicant pool,” said Kim Simons, associate director of athletics.

Conlan, then an assistant coach at N.C. State, was selected over two other finalists.

“They ran the ad, and it kind of caught my eye,” Conlan said. “I put a resume together, a cover letter and I did a phone interview with Kim Simons, and then she contacted me again and said I was one of the finalists.”

The hiring was nothing short of bliss for senior first baseman Lauren Camp. “I was ecstatic,” said the Michigan native, who had been watching the NBA Finals. “I said to my friends, `If the Pistons win tonight and Georgetown gets the softball program, it will go down as one of the best days of my life.’ The Pistons lost the game, but it was still one of the best days of my life.”

The chase to varsity status has frustrated Camp, the club team’s president, since her arrival as a freshman, when she heard there would be a varsity squad before her sophomore year. Yet the athletic department’s annual discussions bore little fruit until recently.

The promotion to varsity status was due to “a combination of a whole bunch of factors,” Simons said, citing Title IX mandates and transitions within the athletic department. “In all honesty, it had been discussed for enough years where it became a situation where this was a good time and it made sense, and we just wanted to move forward with it.”

Rumors grew in the spring that the jump to varsity was fast approaching. The matter even found itself among the topics of discussion in various Georgetown classes. Now, the news is finally official, and while a great deal of preparation still remains for the upcoming season, there is considerable relief among Georgetown’s softballers.

“When I decided to come to Georgetown, I was deciding between playing varsity at a smaller school or coming to a better school at the club level,” Camp said. “It’s hard because club sports have such a limited budget, and there’s such limited space. . It’s hard to get a competitive club team going when you have only eight to 10 girls coming to practice every day.”

For the team, the hiring of Conlan comes after the longtime tutelage of the beloved Coach Richard Brown, a Maryland resident who volunteered to adopt the team seven years ago. Since then, he has taken the Hoyas under his wing, obtaining game space at Prince George’s Community College and offering his van for transportation. Whether his club team will be restored – and if so, when – remains to be seen.

But as for now, the torch is passed to a coach who “is ready to roll up her sleeves [and] represented all the qualities that we were looking for in a head coach,” according to Simons. Conlan has coached softball for 13 years at the collegiate level and has spent the last two as pitching coach at N.C. State.

And then, there is her own softball career, in which she pitched Connecticut to a fifth-place finish in the 1993 Women’s College World Series. That year, Conlan, who compiled a 55-14 career record, was named Big East Pitcher of the Year and was recognized with All-American status.

Twelve years later, she’s taking on a fledgling program with a great deal of heart and its share of obstacles.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do, but I think it’s a program that can succeed because Georgetown is such a special place,” Conlan said. “The school itself has such great tradition and such academic prestige that I think it’s going to be an easy recruiting sell.”

The team, according to Simons, will operate on an allocated budget very similar to those of the athletic department’s other sponsored sports. Other financial specifics and the team’s permanent home are still being discussed.

Despite the fact that no team members graduated in 2005, personnel change is inevitable, as the elevation to varsity status will undoubtedly increase the pool of interested players.

“I think that it’ll help to have a varsity team because it will have more of a competitive edge, because there are a lot of girls that didn’t want to play club,” Sartori said. “[There were] girls who thought it would hurt their game, so they were waiting for a varsity team.”

“The next couple of recruiting classes are the most important,” Conlan said, “because these are the pillars, there are the kids you’re building a program around.”

And so, after Conlan’s hiring, a second advertising campaign – this time, for players – begins.

“We have a lot of work to do, there’s no question,” Athletic Director Bernard Muir said. “But we’re not shying away from it, and we’re going to roll up our sleeves and really grow as a program.”

Conlan’s ambitions are substantial, especially for a head coach of a brand-new team.

“My goal is to play in the Big East conference, and hopefully we’re doing that by the 2008 season,” she says, advocating weight training, more games and more practices to cure the torpor of years past. “I certainly know what it takes to compete at the highest level, and I’m going to go in with that mindset. . If these kids want to play in Division I, they have to know that this is what it takes to play in Division I.”

Hard work, then, appears to be the Hoyas’ first step to legitimacy. But before they hit the diamond too hard, there is still some time left for pensiveness.

“It should be a real thrill for the student-athletes who are involved this year,” Muir said. “They’re going to have a tremendous story. Can you imagine – four years from now, five years from now – where that program has grown to? And they were a part of it in its infant stages. That’s something that they’ll tell for the rest of their lives.”

For Camp, the addition of the varsity softball team in her final year will be the realization of an aspiration she’s had since her arrival to the Hilltop.

“I feel like it’s completed something that was missing before,” she said.