The Milwaukee Brewers of Major League Baseball have promoted Sara Goodrum to the role of Minor League hitting coordinator, according to a tweet from Brewers beat writer Adam McCalvy on Thursday. Goodrum is the first woman in baseball history to hold such a role with a Major League organization. Her official title, per McCalvy’s tweet, is “Coordinator – Hitting Development Initiatives.” In her new role, Goodrum will oversee the offensive development of the Brewers’ minor league “farm” system and will serve as the primary hitting instructor for levels below the Major League team. She will also have oversight of individual…
Author: jmcleod
Wisconsin infielder Taylor Johnson has entered the NCAA’s transfer portal, sources informed JWOS on Thursday. Per sources, Johnson entered the portal on January 25th with a graduate transfer designation. Thanks to the NCAA’s extended eligibility waiver, she has two years of eligibility remaining. Johnson spent the last three seasons at Wisconsin, serving primarily as the Badgers’ starting third baseman. She earned All-Freshman honors from the Big Ten in 2018, and followed that up with nods to the all-conference and all-region first teams in 2019. She had a career year in 2019, batting .341 with fourteen home runs and forty-seven RBIs.…
Despite the uncertainties that remain about the long-term effects brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the transfer portal saw quite a few new entrants through the course of this offseason. While not as plentiful of a group as some may have expected, a number of high-level athletes still chose to change schools ahead of the 2021 season. Some schools lost several players to the portal, while other programs embraced their status as “buyers” on the transfer market. From those programs, we’ve selected the top ten teams who made the biggest splash for their schools in the transfer market. Last week,…
Two years ago, the Houston Cougars were in the driver’s seat of a regional and came just one win away from reaching the Super Regional round of the NCAA tournament. Since Kristin Vesely took over as head coach of the Cougars’ program in 2016, the program has collected 122 wins, emerging victorious in more than 60% of their games. When the 2020 season abruptly ended, Vesely’s squad ranked fifth in the country in home runs and averaged nearly seven runs per game, a top-15 number nationwide. The Cougars have beaten at least one ranked opponent in every year under Vesely’s…
I. Conference Breakdown The Big South has nine member schools that sponsor the sport of softball. Longwood is the reigning conference champion, having won the conference’s regular-season and tournament championships in 2019. When the 2020 season ended, only one conference game had been played, a 1-0 Gardner Webb win over Campbell. Seven of the nine conference teams had winning records at season’s end. At the end of October 2020, Hampton announced that the school will forgo competition in all sports for the 2021 spring season. The Pirates’ decision not to play this year gives the Big South eight competing teams…
While preparations for the 2021 softball season are in full swing in some parts of the country, the nation’s historically greatest conference has slowly just begun to return to the diamond. With teams on the West coast and many in the state of California, regulations amid the COVID-19 pandemic have kept many of the normal January preparations in check. Some teams remain optimistic that they’ll be able to begin the season on time – Washington is currently set to begin the season at a 4-team tournament in Las Vegas on February 12th, for instance – while others won’t even begin…
Cal State Bakersfield’s softball program will see a rise in their available scholarships thanks to a recently-announced donor gift. The gift, which is committed across a five-year time span, will see the Roadrunners’ program reach the NCAA’s maximum-allowable number of scholarships for the first time in program history. Shelly Carlin, a former Motorola executive and UCLA softball alumna, made the $500,000 commitment to Roadrunner athletics. The gift will establish the Athletics Director’s Women’s Excellence Funds at CSUB, in addition to increasing the softball program’s scholarships. In a statement issued as part of a press release announcing the gift, Carlin said,…
Paige Knussman has been named the head coach at Division III Marymount University, the school announced on Friday. Knussman is the first head coach in Saints program history, and she will be tasked with laying the foundation for the program that is set to begin competition in the 2022 season. Most recently, Knussman spent a single year as the top assistant at fellow Division III school William Peace. While at WPU, she was the team’s head development coach; led the team’s recruiting efforts; and worked with the team’s offense. Prior to joining the staff at WPU, Knussman spent a tenure…
Since she got to Texas in the summer of 2018, Miranda Elish’s star had steadily risen. A top-ranked recruit coming out of travel ball, Elish began her career at Oregon with an undefeated streak that stretched for more than a year. She spent two seasons as a Duck before following Mike White to the 40 Acres to become a Longhorn. In her two seasons as a Longhorn, including the abbreviated 2020 campaign, Elish went from being a piece of one stellar pitching staff at Oregon to a bonafide star all on her own in Austin. She immediately stepped into the…
We are just a few weeks from the start of the 2021 season, and coaching moves are still happening. From assistant moves in Division I to new head coaches and assistants in Division II, we don’t want you to miss any of the latest goings-on.