With this weekend’s wins against Minnesota, the Badgers ended their Big Ten season play with their best record in school history.
After Saturday’s 1-0 win and Sunday’s 2-1 win, the Badgers secured their position in the Big Ten Tournament, where they will be ranked number four with a record of 11-6. Due to the cancellation of two games against Indiana, the team could have had two more conference wins, as Indiana finished last in the Big Ten this year.
This will be the third consecutive year the Badgers have made it to the Big Ten Tournament, but this year marks the highest ranking they have ever earned. The previous year they were ranked sixth, out of six teams, and the year before that fifth.
This being only the seventh year the UW softball program has existed, the team has improved drastically since the inaugural season when the team went 14-39-1 overall and 3-21 in the Big Ten.
Much of this turn around has occurred since head coach Karen Gallagher brought in her first huge recruiting class, who are now juniors, with the exception of Meghann Reiss, who was red-shirted her freshman year.
“I know coming into my freshman year we had never been to a Big Ten Tournament,” co-captain Meghann Reiss said.
“They hadn’t really had a good season the year before so there was not pressure on our freshman class, but if you look at our freshman class and where we are now, I mean you have me, Andrea [Kirchberg], Nicky [Starry] and Anna Jones. We have all come through this program and we know what to expect from ourselves and we know what a winning team takes.”
Gallagher seems to agree with Reiss and attributes much of her success to key recruiting.
“I think it goes back to bringing in the right people; like Andrea Kirchberg has been wonderful for our program,” Gallagher said. “Today we got hits, our veteran players, like Meghann Reiss, who came through with a clutch hit. It is such a nice mix of athletes on our team right now and they are all doing their jobs.”
While the program is consistently growing to be one of the most respected programs in the nation, what is the biggest difference between this year’s team and last year’s team that has been the key to a more successful season?
“Maturity,” Gallagher said.
“I think we are growing and learning to deal with the pressure better and you have too, good teams do that. I am still expecting us offensively to kind of break out of something because I feel like we have the potential of being a great hitting team. If you look at the line-up on paper, every one of them has done it at some point in the season. If we just put a few games together and have everybody on the same channel with the same energy in terms of potentially playing their top games, we could be a team to reckon with for the next few weeks.”
The team’s only senior, Kerry Hagen, also feels this year’s team has something more special than the other team’s she has played on in the past four years.
“I think we work together really well, and I think team chemistry has been better than it has been in the past, and I think that helps a lot,” Hagen said. “[The program] has improved dramatically; it is still a young program and it has grown so much. I think it has a lot to do with the seniors that were here last year and the leadership that has been on the team.”
Many different reasons contribute to why this year’s team is the best team in UW history, but there is no denying that this team has the ability to win the Big Ten Tournament and to go extremely far into regionals.
“[This program] has gone from being ‘let’s gain some respect’ to ‘we are respected, we are competitive and we are nationally a team to be reckoned with,'” Gallagher said.
