It wasn’t that long ago that Saint Anselm was ‘just another Division II school.’ In 2016, the Hawks had a sub-.500 record. A year later, they finished two games above that .500 mark. But in the two years since, head coach Jill Gagnon has guided the program to previously-unseen heights.
The 2018 season saw the Hawks post forty-four wins and reach the World Series championship series, before ultimately losing back-to-back games to finish the season as national runners-up. In 2019, looking to build off of that strong surge, the team again reached the 40-win mark, but some stumbles in the Super Regional stood in the way of back-to-back World Series berths. Despite the earlier-than-expected exit from the most recent NCAA tournament, Gagnon took a lot of positives from her team’s performance during the spring.
“My biggest takeaways as the coach [from 2019]would be a couple of things… we know we have a great pitching staff, probably the best overall staff in the entire region,” Gagnon said. “We honestly have three #1 pitchers on our staff. So that’s a big thing. We were fortunate to only graduate one player from last year, so we are pretty much returning the entire team. We also picked up two key transfers that we are really excited about… now, if you look at our record from last year, we lost eleven games, including the two in the Super Regional, and six of those were either decided by one run or in extra innings.
“So with that being said, we know we have good pitching; good defense; and we are returning the core of the team. Our focus this year is really that, if we can hit a little bit better, really get some players with good RBI numbers, we’re going to be in a really good spot to hopefully continue to be one of the best teams in the East region.”
With such a swift ascent to the upper tier of Division II, the Hawks had to get used to a new mentality during the 2019 campaign: That of being the hunted, instead of the hunters.
“Last year, we wound up being ranked as high as #1 at one point,” Gagnon noted. “Once we really got things rolling, it took us the first fifteen or twenty games to figure out our new identity. But then going forward, we were nearly unstoppable; we really got on a roll, only dropped a couple of conference games, and rolled through the regional. But in the Super Regional, we ran into LIU-Post.”
The Hawks would drop the best-of-three Super Regional series to LIU-Post, ending the season with an extra-innings 2-1 loss that Gagnon called “heartbreaking.” However, her team’s depth and experience are two things that she sees as bright spots in looking ahead to the 2020 campaign.
“I think our biggest asset is that we did only lose one player,” Gagnon said. “We have this group of five seniors, they have the experience in those tough games, they have the experience of playing at the highest level… last year, showing that we were able to continue our success and not be a ‘one-hit wonder’ was a big confidence builder for us and huge for our program. Our goal is to finish the job and get back to the top. We know that over forty-five or fifty games, it’s really tough to get there. We just want to get back to the NCAA tournament, and once you get there, anything can happen.”
The Hawks’ pitching staff – led by all-American innings-eater Morgan Perry – posted a 1.54 ERA as a unit in 2019, with 351 strikeouts to their credit. Perry – the elder statesman in a group that also includes junior Courtney Fisher and sophomore McKenna Smith – should be a bright spot once-again for the Hawks on the pitching rubber.
While Gagnon’s team seemed to go from 0 to 100 in the blink of an eye over the past couple of seasons, it was a rise that she always knew her team was capable of: “Where it probably took a turn for us was in 2017; I think we started out 2-8… then we just hit this point where we could see the tide was turning for us. We wound up finishing that season over .500 and each year we’ve just gotten better and better. A couple of years ago, in 2018, it was the first full team of players that I had recruited. It’s a group of players that have really thrived, and I really see them as an extension of me and our coaching staff.
“Not many players can say that they’ve played for a national championship, but these kids can,” Gagnon added. “They’ve played on the biggest stages and been successful. It’s a confidence that we carry, but we still stay humble. We’re ready to prove that we’re not just a fluke. These players want to make sure they leave the program set up for success for years to come.”
