On August 24, 2022, longtime Michigan Softball coach Carol Hutchins announced her retirement after 38 seasons at the helm of the program. She departs as the only face that Michigan Softball has ever had, the winningest coach in D1 Softball history, and a living legend of the game. I have covered Michigan Softball in some capacity for five seasons and took the past two months crafting this piece, my (and this site's) authoritative goodbye to a Michigan icon. My hope is that readers find it a reasonable send-off to a coach who often seemed larger than life to cover. 

I first met Carol Hutchins in person in the second week of February 2018. It was the second Michigan Softball media availability of the season. I, a freshman member of WCBN Sports Radio at the University of Michigan, was there to ask some questions and perhaps get a few soundbites for our station's softball podcast. I had covered the team's opening weekend tournament down in Tampa, Florida, and was just getting my feet wet on the softball beat. Names like Madison Uden, Faith Canfield, and Tera Blanco were green in my brain at that time. I thought I was starting to get a hang of this softball thing, but I knew the real test would be interviewing Hutch for the first time. 

Growing up in Ann Arbor and following Michigan athletics reasonably closely, Carol Hutchins was a ubiquitous name held highly in the mind of anyone who cared about sports in this city. Even if softball was far from your favorite thing, you knew that Michigan Softball was good and you knew Carol Hutchins was why. "Hutch" was the reason that softball meant something more to Michigan than a typical non-rev. "Hutch" was why Michigan was nationally competitive in softball in the 1990s and early 2000s, a time when good softball was so rarely found east of the Rockies. And "Hutch" was why Michigan was nationally competitive into the mid-2010s, even as the sport had taken a decisively southern turn. 

Hutch had an intense demeanor to her on the field and off of it. That's why, as I walked into the UM softball complex that day, I was intimidated. Of course, I first had to find the dang softball lounge inside a building I'd never entered, but after that, yeah, I was nervous. Most everyone I've talked to who covered softball in some capacity, be it for WCBN, the Daily, BTN Student U, or WOLV TV, was nervous the first time they interviewed Hutch. A wise man might have called it a rite of passage among student media members.

[Bryan Fuller]

I don't recall what questions I asked the first time I interviewed Hutch too well. Really it was me trying to get acclimated. Some basic questions about what I'd seen in Tampa, how the team looked, that sort of thing. I may have stammered ever so slightly, or rushed my words as a result of the nervousness, but Hutch answered them honestly. The passion in her eyes burned brightly and the steely visage was present but the answers she gave were thoughtful and fair. She didn't Bill Belichick the responses or laugh them off, because she knew I was from the one outlet who traveled to Tampa and appreciated that. 

That's the thing you learned about Hutch pretty quickly being on the beat: no one cared more about softball than Carol Hutchins and Carol Hutchins took softball seriously. She wanted you to take softball seriously. She wanted it to be treated like the big dollar men's sports in the media and if she could tell that you knew your stuff, she could tolerate the hard question. But if you asked Hutch something tough and it's clear you didn't know what you were talking about? Hutch would rip you apart like a pack wolves and a freshly slain carcass.  

Over my next three years at Michigan, I attended the pre-season softball media availability three times. Each time I was now a "veteran" on the beat, and the student journalists from the Daily were always freshmen. The fun part for me was seeing which ones would ask the right questions and which ones would show their lack of knowledge and eaten alive (my second favorite part, just behind seeing Hutch's golden retriever wandering around). When one unsuspecting freshman asked the superficial question exposing they hadn't done their homework, I enjoyed chuckling as the snappy response back was something of a verbal slap across the face, even if I felt bad when the reporter's face turned red. That was learning on the job covering Hutch. 

I'm not going to act like I was the expert in interviewing Carol Hutchins. I was a radio announcer, not a beat writer, one who did lots of games, yes, but my job wasn't to collect interviews. We featured them from time to time on our podcast but anyone who spent a full year on the Daily softball beat interviewed Hutch as many times in one year as I did in four. But what I got to see in doing it for four years was a closer look at the program, the traits that defined it, and the leadership Carol Hutchins provided, even in her final years. I got a certain connection to the program and its players, one that hasn't left me, making me continue to write softball for this site into year five (and soon, year six), even if the clicks mostly go to my other responsibilities. Softball matters to me and it always will, and that's what I gained covering Hutch. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: A look back at Carol Hutchins' career]

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[JD Scott]

1,707. That's how many games Carol Hutchins won in her career as an NCAA Softball coach, 1,684 of them at the University of Michigan. 22 Big Ten regular season titles. 10 Big Ten Tournament titles. 29 NCAA Tournament appearances. 12 trips to the Women's College World Series. 1 national championship. 18 Big Ten Coach of the Year awards. 2 National Coach of the Year awards. 20 times a Michigan player was named Big Ten Player of the Year. 16 times a Michigan player was named Big Ten Pitcher fo the Year. 13 times a Michigan player was named Big Ten Freshman of the Year. 41 players selected as All-Americans, totaling 69 selections. 

The list of Carol Hutchins' career achievements is too long to comprehend properly. A run of success and dominance in the Big Ten Conference that spans multiple generations, nearly 40 years' worth of softball. The players she first coached at Michigan are well into their 50s- one of her early players is now 53 and was just named the new head coach of Michigan Softball (Bonnie Tholl). Another, who played for the team two decades later and achieved a decorated career including an Olympic silver medal, was just hired as an assistant for the program (Amanda Chidester). Her former players now include the head coaches of Ohio State, Harvard, and Duke (Kelly Kovach Schoenly, Jenny Allard, and Marissa Young). Carol Hutchins' influence can be found everywhere in the NCAA Softball world. 

The darndest thing about reading over the details of Carol Hutchins' career is you quickly realize that her story is also the story of college softball at large. She experienced the growing pains of the nascent sport as a player, and then was a part of the early wave of coaches who helped get the sport off the ground. She began coaching at Michigan shortly after the NCAA took over the administration of college softball and her teams were at the Women's College World Series just after it ended its nomadic phase of the 1980s and settled into its forever home in Oklahoma City. 

From there, NCAA Softball changed considerably but one thing that seemingly never changed over the next 25 years was Carol Hutchins' Michigan Wolverines making the NCAA Tournament and competing with the best. Michigan under Hutch was nationally competitive when other schools (including several in the B1G) were still adding programs. They were nationally competitive when the growth of the sport forced an expansion of the tournament and the creation of Super Regionals and her lone national title was fittingly the first year that the championship was decided in a best-of-three series. Hutch's Michigan teams were nationally competitive when Ivy League teams were still making the WCWS, when the PAC-10 dominated the sport, and when the center of power had shifted towards the SEC. Over Carol Hutchins' time at the helm at Michigan, everything about NCAA Softball changed, but Michigan and Hutch never did. Now the sport will continue to change and for the first time in decades, Michigan will be forced to change rapidly with it. 

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[MSU Athletics]

What we now call NCAA Softball was created in the aftermath of Title IX in the early 1970s, when athletic departments were quickly adding women's sports. Several schools already had college softball, with the first Women's College World Series (WCWS) being held in 1969. That WCWS would see Illinois State take second to John F. Kennedy College in Wahoo, Nebraska, which is a decent indicator of how under-developed college softball was at that time. It's worth noting that one player on that ISU team was Melinda Fischer, who would later go on to coach Illinois State for 37 years and is one of the winningest coaches in college softball history (also a rival of Carol Hutchins' at the yearly Tampa invitational). 

The schools without softball programs in the pre-Title IX era began adding them throughout the 70s as college softball started to grow. It was still under the domain of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women until 1982, when the NCAA wrestled control of women's sports away from the AIAW. In the B1G, Michigan State and Ohio State added Softball in 1972, Minnesota and Indiana in 1974, Northwestern in 1976, and Iowa and Michigan in 1978 (Wisconsin, Illinois, and Purdue did not come until much later).

Carol Hutchins was in that first wave of pioneering athletes who played softball in the 70s. After graduating Lansing's Everett High School in 1975, she would play for MSU from 1976-1979 and won a national championship as a shortstop for Michigan State in '76. This was the era when the WCWS was hosted in Omaha, Nebraska over the span of a couple days. In 1980, it would move to Norman, Oklahoma, before returning to Omaha when the NCAA took over, from 1982-1987. In 1988, the WCWS relocated to Sunnyvale, California for a brief two year stop, before settling for good in Oklahoma City in 1990. 

MSU winning the 1976 national championship [Rudy Smith, Omaha World Herald]

The tumultuous period of the 70s saw softball grow at every level; not just were college programs adding it... so were high schools. The National Fastpitch Coaches Association estimates that the number of girls playing sports in high school went from 1 in 27 to 1 in 3 within a few years of Title IX's passage, and softball was one of the many beneficiaries of that sea change. The USASoftball youth program began in 1974, and it's worth remembering that this earthquake period for softball, and for women in sports broadly, overlapped exactly with Carol Hutchins' adolescence and high school years. She was less than a month past her 15th birthday when Title IX was enacted by the United States Congress and she lived the shifting dynamics in the sport during both her high school and college years. 

Though the US Congress forced universities to adopt women's sports, they certainly didn't force them to care, or make it easy on the coaches and activists who wanted those sports to succeed and that's where we begin to move to Hutch, the coach. The stories from the early days of college softball, the realities that Carol Hutchins lived and breathed, are humbling. When Hutch arrived as an assistant coach at Michigan in 1983, her salary was $3,000 (adjusted for inflation that is $9,422 in 2022's dollars). The first head coach of Michigan Softball was Gloria Soluk, the women's basketball coach who was asked to coach softball as a courtesy to the university to get the program up and running. After Hutch took over the softball program in a few years later, she was also the groundskeeper for the field her players played on, watering the grass and mowing it. In those days, Michigan Softball had a primitive setup and Hutch was the one responsible for it, nothing that resembled a true stadium. 

Carol Hutchins was named head coach of Michigan Softball in 1985 for the upcoming season, her second head coaching job after a brief stint at Ferris State in 1982. The Big Ten Conference had just been formed for softball a few years prior and Michigan didn't finish higher than 4th under predecessor Bob De Carolis. Michigan finished 2nd in the conference under Hutchins in year one, with a 16-8 record in league play and a 28-20 record overall. They had a better record overall but a worse one in conference play the next season but starting in 1987, Michigan embarked on a three year run where they finished 2nd in the B1G every season. They were not good enough to make an NCAA Tournament that had only 20 teams in the field, but progress was being made. Hutchins' first B1G Player of the Year winners came during this stretch, with Vicki Morrow (1987), Michelle Bolster (1988), and Jenny Allard (1989) dominating the awards podium. Bonnie Tholl also began her carer during this period, one that would finish with her being the first player to earn All-B1G honors all four seasons. 

[Michigan in the World exhibit, LSA]

1992 proved to be the year that Michigan took the step forward to elite, proving itself in more ways than one. The team finished 37-24 overall and 22-6 in conference play, winning the first B1G championship for both the program and Carol Hutchins. Patti Benedict won B1G Player of the Year and Kelley Kovach was named B1G Freshman and Pitcher of the Year. Aside from wins and losses, the program finished renovations to make Alumni Field into a true stadium, building permanent steel seats, dugouts, bullpens, and a parking lot. 

Having a proper stadium was a good idea for a program that was in the process of blasting off to join college softball's elite. The Wolverines repeated as B1G champs in '93, took a small step back in '94, but then pieced it all together for a banner 1995 season. Armed with a senior Kovach in the circle (B1G Pitcher of the Year again) and the great two-way player Sara Griffin (B1G Player of the Year), Hutchins won her 3rd B1G title in 4 seasons, going 50-12 (most wins in school history), and the Wolverines qualified for the Women's College World Series for the first time in program history. They dropped both games in Oklahoma City, but it was a tremendous step forward for the program. 

That 1995 campaign also ushered in a period of dominance for Michigan Softball. Of course, winning three of four conference titles was already some degree of dominance, but this is the period where Hutch's project entered cruise control. Between 1995 and 1999, they'd win five straight B1G titles, and over eleven seasons from 1995 to 2005, they won nine B1G titles. In the two years that Michigan did not win the B1G, they took second both times. Their regular season record in the conference over those eleven seasons was 197-39 (.835). Michigan also won seven of the eleven B1G Tournaments held in that span, made the NCAAs every season, and qualified for the WCWS in eight of eleven seasons. Hutch's Wolverines were laden with a star of the conference seemingly every season, from Griffin to Traci Conrad to Marissa Young to Marie Barda to Kelsey Kollen to Jessica Merchant to Nicole Motycka and on and on. 

Jessica Merchant [Michigan Softball]

During that decade-long run of B1G dominance, NCAA Softball was blasting off just like Michigan was. The NCAA Tournament had already expanded to 32 teams and standardized the Regional process by the time the Maize & Blue arrived in OKC in 1995, and it just kept growing as more and more programs added the sport and more players arrived at the collegiate level. In 1999, the Tournament expanded again, this time to 48 teams. Only a few years later, it grew once more, to 64 in 2002, as the impact of the first generation born after Title IX took the sport by storm. 

The balance of power in this era was decidedly out west, with Sharron Backus and Sue Enquist's UCLA and Mike Candrea's Arizona trading titles. Between 1988 and 2004, 14 of 17 national championships were won by one of those two programs. The only three not captured by the Bruins or Wildcats were won by Fresno State in 1998, California in 2002, and notably a non-western school in 2000, Oklahoma. That would be Patty Gasso's first title, the coach who has since built the Sooners into the unstoppable juggernaut they presently are. 

Western dominance was undeniable. The elite programs were out west and like college baseball, the schedule of the sport favored schools in warmer climates. The PAC-10 was taking half the slots in the WCWS in any given year, with the Big 12 and perhaps one Florida school taking the others. If Michigan made it, they were usually one of the only (if not the only) northern, cold-weather school. Over that 1995-2005 span, Iowa's four appearances accounted for the only non-Michigan B1G representation in the WCWS, and outside of those two schools, it was down to a handful of appearances between the likes of DePaul, UMass, and Princeton for the region. 

[Bentley Historical Library]

The year that ended that span I've been talking about, 2005, was the one that will live forever in Michigan lore. Michigan went 17-3 in the conference to win the B1G again, defended home field by winning the B1G Tournament, and with a sterling overall record, were named the top seed for the NCAAs. This was the first year with Super Regionals and it would also be the first year with a best two-out-of-three set up to decide the winner in OKC. Michigan again defended home field, beating back Seton Hall, UNC, and Canisius in the regional and Washington in the three-game Super Regional. Off to Oklahoma City the Wolverines went.

The team was loaded, with a senior Jessica Merchant and junior Tiffany Haas forming a devastating combo in the middle infield while Grace Leutele and B1G Freshman of the Year Samantha Findlay manned the corners. More bats, including OFs Alessandra Giampaolo and Stephanie Bercaw and DP Nicole Motycka fortified the lineup, while the seemingly untouchable duo of Jennie Ritter (B1G Pitcher of the Year) and Lorilyn Wilson dominated the circle, trading pitcher of the week honors as the year went along. The team ERA was below 1.00, while the team OPS exceeded .900. After losing on February 12 to Baylor, they did not lose for 32 straight games, a streak that lasted until April 1. In that time Michigan toppled #1 Arizona out in Fullerton, CA, and consolidated a grip on the top ranking. To say that expectations were high headed into the WCWS is an understatement. 

Michigan dispatched DePaul and Texas to get going, exactly what you're supposed to do in a double-elimination bracket. The pitching powered the day, as Ritter threw back to back complete game shutouts with 12 K's in each. In the driver's seat, Michigan faced Tennessee, losing the first game in an 11-inning classic but winning the winner-take-all final game 3-2, with Ritter's pitching and a Bercaw 2-run HR carrying the day.

The Wolverines were moving on to the WCWS finals, a three game series against the most fitting rival, the program that had dominated the sport for so long: UCLA. The Bruins battered Michigan pitching in game one and took a 2-0 lead in game two before the bats arrived, as key hits from Becky Marx, Merchant, and Findlay powered Michigan to victory. That set up the sudden death championship game (which you can watch in its entirety here), June 8, 2005. Michigan trailed most of the game 1-0, but a Findlay single tied the game in the sixth. The game rolled into extras, a pitcher's duel between Ritter and Anjelica Selden. UCLA had a runner on third with one out in the bottom of the 9th but a pop out and groundout got Michigan out of the jam. Then, in the top of the 10th, after an error extended the inning, this happened: 

Freshman Samantha Findlay delivered a three-run home run in the 10th to clinch the 2005 #WCWS title for @umichsoftball!

Relive this and more unforgettable NCAA championship finishes: https://t.co/VLtc4kUBSn #NCAASoftball #TBT pic.twitter.com/XCZyAq7WVR

— NCAA Softball (@NCAASoftball) April 11, 2019

Findlay's three-run HR put Michigan ahead and Ritter would hurl a 1-2-3 bottom of the tenth. It was over, Michigan had won a national championship and Hutch was finally #1. In the process, the Wolverines were the first team east of the Mississippi to ever win a national title, a feat that would become less impressive as the SEC grew in the coming years. But winning as a northern team? As impressive as it gets, an accomplishment that is still an outlier even now, 17 years later. You can tell by this map of every school to have won an NCAA National Championship in softball: 

After the championship, Michigan had a few "down" years where they didn't win the B1G- but still were in the Super Regionals as one of the top 16 teams in college softball. Starting in 2008, Hutch began another highlight of her career, a nine-season run of consecutive B1G championships. Over that span, they'd make the WCWS four more times and dominated the conference in a way that was truly breathtaking. If you thought the 1995-2005 record in conference play was impressive, let me give you this, the 2008-2016 record in B1G play: 169-24 (.876). 

That period saw many more legends play at Alumni Field, a complex that was expanding further. In 2007 a project added an indoor hitting facility, press box, concession area, and doubled the seating. Permanent lights had been added in 2003 and in 2014, AstroTurf came to the outfield, as did the video screen in left field and the Donald R. Shepherd Softball Center behind the stadium. It was a souped up facility befitting of the great players who played there in the late 2000s and early 2010s, hurlers like Nikki Nemitz, Jordan Taylor, Haylie Wagner, and Megan Betsa and hitters like Findlay, Maggie Viefhaus, and Amanda Chidester. 

[Bryan Fuller]

But one player towered above them all during this period of Hutch's reign, the transcendent talent that was Sierra Romero. She arrived at Michigan in 2013 and was instantly a superstar. She was named B1G Freshman of the Year and B1G Player of the Year in her first season after hitting .379 with 23 HRs. Then in 2014, she hit .491(!!!) with 18 HRs to win B1G Player of the Year again. Her quadruple slash was .491/.633/1.079/1.712. The next year, she did it again, dropping 30 points of OBP for 30 points of SLG. Romo was laughably not named B1G Player of the Year (Minnesota P Sara Groenewegen got it), but would win it once more in 2016, when she became the only player in Michigan history to be named USA Softball Collegiate Player of the Year. Romero was the first Michigan player to be named an All-American all four seasons of her Michigan career. Under Carol Hutchins' tenure, there was no shortage of tremendous players. Sierra Romero was the greatest of them all. 

And luckily for the fans, there was also a team around this one-of-a-kind talent to win, a core that turned out to be Hutch's last nationally contending team. With Haylie Wagner and Megan Betsa in the circle and a deep lineup of hitters who could complement Romero, including Sierra Lawrence, Kelly Christner, Kelsey Susalla, Lauren Sweet, and Abby Ramirez, Michigan was ready to win. That 2015 Michigan team won the B1G in the regular season, won the B1G Tournament, and were named the #3 national seed. They cruised through the regional and then over Georgia in the Super Regional, punching their ticket to OKC.

The Women's College World Series that the 2015 Michigan team appeared in was quite different than the one the 2005 team had competed in. During the intervening 10 years, the sport had shifted eastward towards the SEC. This time there were just two PAC-12 teams in the field and four SEC teams. The SEC had placed a team in the championship series four straight years and had won two of the preceding three titles. The SEC was now the best conference in college softball without question, snaring 5 of the top 8 national seeds for the NCAA Tournament in 2015 and 7 of the top 14 seeds overall. 

The modern WCWS crowd [SEC]

The WCWS was more of a spectacle as well, with crowds ballooning far beyond what they were when Hutch first reached Oklahoma City twenty years prior, and renovations to USA Softball Hall of Fame Stadium were ongoing. Concessions had been expanded and concourses had been widened for the 2015 series, and a few years later they'd add 4,000 more seats, a state-of-the-art jumbotron, and an expanded two-level press box. Softball was no longer the underground sport where the coach was in charge of watering the fields. At powerhouse programs who reach Oklahoma City, it was now a top tier NCAA sport, one that would, within a few years, have its championship game post higher TV ratings than the men's baseball one, attracting ~1.7 M fans on TV. In 1989, a total of 14,448 fans attended the 14 games in OKC. Three decades later, nearly that many fans were attending just one of the fourteen games alone. 

So for Carol Hutchins, this trip to OKC was in some ways a reflection of her legacy. Of course, the 2015 WCWS trip was all about winning and Michigan did a lot of it. There they swept through the double elimination bracket in undefeated fashion, setting up a showdown with #1 Florida. The teams traded one-run wins in the first two games, setting up the second championship series G3 of Hutch's career. This one didn't go as well, with Florida pulling it out 4-1, a gut-wrenching heartbreak for the Michigan faithful. 

There was still hope for 2016, as much of the team returned for one last ride. They'd have another marvelous season, which included a major milestone, as Hutchins became the winningest coach in D1 softball history, passing Margie Wright. The Wolverines nabbed the #2 national seed after stitching together a terrific regular season and would cruise to OKC again. This time, though, the stay was shorter. After winning the opening game, the Wolverines lost to #3 Oklahoma 7-5 and then faced #8 FSU with their season on the line. For a team with an exceptional offense, the bats surprisingly fell silent in the final game, a stinging 1-0 defeat to the 'Noles.

That would prove to be the end of the run for Hutch among the best of college softball, unfortunately. Her 2017 team took a major step back without Romero. They'd gain an influx of talent over the next couple seasons, winning three more B1G titles in 2018, 2019, and 2021, sandwiched around the canceled 2020 campaign, but despite dominant pitching from Alex Storako and Meghan Beaubien, they'd never again have the bats necessary to compete nationally. In a college softball landscape that was tilting heavily towards power hitting, the Wolverines found themselves without the sort of power they once had, cobbling together a solid lineup that included 2021 B1G Player of the Year Lexie Blair (Hutch's last honoree), but did not have the depth or power needed to compete nationally. They hosted a regional in 2019 and were in a sudden death final game in 2021 in the Seattle Regional, but came up short in both games. 2016 proved to be the end of an era and after a 2022 season that came in well below expectations, the era was finally over when Carol Hutchins announced her retirement.

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[Bryan Fuller]

I want to close this piece by circling back to the personal anecdotes I dropped in at the beginning. The program and culture that surrounds Michigan Softball is a special environment, one reserved for only the most elite programs and within the B1G it is a total anomaly. A network of people who all care this much about this sport at a northern, cold-weather school is remarkable and that web of caring is the doing of Carol Hutchins and I was lucky to get to be a part of it for the last years of Hutch's time as coach. 

Softball is actually how I got in the door at MGoBlog. I remember laying in a hotel room bed in Madison, Wisconsin, in mid-May, 2018. It was during the Big Ten Softball Tournament and I was there covering the event. In station club group chat, veteran softball guy and erstwhile MGoBlogger Morris Fabbri posted that he had a job opening at MGoBlog that he would be resigning from to pursue future professional endeavors. He told us that if anyone was interested, he would pass along our name to Seth. I, a reader of the site, messaged: 

Morris, quite a few years older than me, was an icon of our softball coverage and someone I'd looked up to at the station. I also had gotten the chance to do a few podcasts and softball broadcasts with him and he happened to like me enough to send my name- and a positive recommendation- along to Seth. Sure enough, I got the gig, which was setting up and taking down podcast equipment for the MGoRadio live shows back in the Bo Store days, and doing quality control during the podcast. It was from that job that I got to know Brian and Seth, and got included in the oh-so-prestigious MGoSlack channel. 

I never forgot how I got there. To this day, my profile picture in our Slack channel is still a softball [evidence] and my first chance to write on this site was about softball, back in early 2020. I figured it was the one thing I had expertise on that no one else on staff really did. From there, I slowly moved onto the hockey beat, and eventually all the way up to being The Guy Who Watches Terrible Football And Charts It So You Don't Have To Watch It. Michigan Softball gave me all that, and Carol Hutchins is the reason for it. It gave me some of the most meaningful professional connections I made in college and opened the door to this job that I enjoy doing so much. 

Michigan Softball was my first taste of what it was like to work in sports. To be on the radio and on twitter and have people message you because they love what you're doing or they tell you to DIE IN HELL for not knowing a fact about an opposing team. It gave me a chance to interview players and coaches, to run and edit a podcast, to travel the country, and to meet friends and make memories that I will take with me to the end of my time on this planet. Michigan Softball made me fall in love with working in sports because I fell in love with softball. Softball was a sport I could cover as a freshman at WCBN, one with prestige and responsibility because we were the only TV or radio outlet who covered the sport like it ought to be covered, traveling to regular season tournaments, showing up to Alumni Field for every game and producing analytical content.

One of my many photos from the press box at Alumni Field 

Getting put on that beat in my first couple months in the club and soaking up all the travel, fan engagement, and airtime that came with it made me love to speak into a microphone and type on a keyboard. As a kid I always dreamed of doing something like that but softball made me realize I wanted to do it for real. I fell in love with the crack of the metal bat, the non-stop chants from the dugout, the beautiful April afternoons and evenings, and the time out on the road. Softball will always have a place in my heart, as a joyous sport to watch and a pleasure to cover. 

My experiences falling in love with Michigan Softball is the best example of what is anomalous about this program that Carol Hutchins built and its place in the B1G. Michigan State was the only other school I ever seriously considered going to and when it comes to softball, they are like everyone else in the conference. I sat in the press box at Secchia Stadium one time for a softball game and it was close to empty. The stadium was close to empty. At MSU, softball is another generic niche sport that no one cares about. At Michigan, it is something special. That culture around Michigan Softball I've talked about, the diehard fans, the network of alumni, the families of the players, all the people who care enough to donate a couple thousand bucks to send two college kids to Florida to broadcast a tournament no one else will so they can follow the action of their favorite team... that is where the magic was. All of that was built by Carol Hutchins. 

No matter how much I got frustrated at times by small ball tactics, or the lack of power hitting, or the heartbreak in the regionals of 2019 or 2021, I could never be mad at Hutch. We were all just lucky to get to experience this exceptional program she built from scratch, even if I got it in the twilight of her years. The Michigan Softball she built meant so much to me and gave me nearly everything I have in this industry. I can only be thankful for that and hope that Bonnie Tholl carries on this legacy for the next generation(s) of aspiring sports media folks who come through the University of Michigan. Because anybody who covered Hutch and this program, at any of the student sports media outlets, will tell you they gained at least a little something special from it, even if they can't be as romantic as I am. 

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[Bryan Fuller]

I've spent some 5,700 words spilling the history of Carol Hutchins, NCAA Softball, and my personal experiences with Michigan Softball, but I suppose I could have just accomplished it with two simple words: "thank you". Thank you to Carol Hutchins for being a perfect representative of the University of Michigan in this sport, one who represented the Michigan Wolverines with hard work, intensity, respect for the sport, and as James Earl Jones would say, an enthusiasm unknown to mankind. If there's one thing I'll remember about Carol Hutchins, it's exactly that, her undying enthusiasm and love for the game of softball. No one loved softball more than Hutch and no one believed more strongly in a rightful place in sports for women and girls everywhere than Hutch. 

She never left that place she came from, be it her time as a pioneering athlete when women's sports were getting off the ground or those days as a young coach, earning a salary not enough to pay the bills and watering a dingy field not worthy of the term "stadium". Hutch remembered the battles she and so many other women like her had to fight to create the world of NCAA Softball (and women's sports generally) that exists today. In losing Hutch from the everyday softball coaching world, we lose a living shard of history too and as this generation of coaches retire, from Hutchins to Melinda Fisher to Margo Jonker to Margie Wright, the sport is another step removed from its humble roots. Hutch would never want you to forget that beginning, even after she's gone. 

It's nearly impossible to imagine the college softball we have today without Carol Hutchins. She was one of the best softball coaches to ever do it, comically dominant in the Big Ten and a force nationally for so long, despite the deck stacked against her program geographically. Yet her legacy extends far beyond that. Hutch's legacy is Alumni Field and the softball complex that stands behind it. Her legacy is every fan who comes to a Michigan Softball game, every person who follows @umichsoftball on Twitter and Instagram, and all the young girls in this state who fall in love with softball after attending a Michigan Softball game as a fan. Hutch's legacy is Sierra Romero and Bonnie Tholl and Amanda Chidester and Haylie Wagner. Her legacy is, in some small part, the glorious stadium that now sits in OKC and all the fans that pack that stadium in June, as well as all the eyeballs glued to the TV when the WCWS is on. 

Hutch gave us, as Michigan fans, this great softball program we know and love. She gave us all those legendary players I've mentioned, all the years that dot the "Big Ten Champions" sign on the scoreboard at Alumni Field, and she gave us a spring sport to care about. For all that we can only be thankful, mired in a state of eternal gratitude for 38 years of top notch softball and a program culture spanning generations. So long, Hutch. Enjoy your retirement.