Former Baylor assistant coach Mark Lumley has passed away after a battle with cancer. Lumley died in the early hours of Sunday morning, according to a Facebook post from his wife. He was 65 years old. The most recent battle with cancer was Lumley’s fourth. He initially had cancer in 2007, ultimately having his prostate removed at that time. He went through chemotherapy treatments in 2015 due to cancer in his lymph nodes, and later battled colorectal cancer in 2018. In March of this year, Lumley found out that cancer had spread to his vertebrae. Lumley was a part of…
Author: jmcleod
Former Bethune-Cookman standout Lauren McCoy has been elected to the MEAC Hall of Fame as part of the induction Class of 2021. McCoy starred in the circle for Bethune-Cookman during her playing career in the early 2000s. She recorded 20 wins in a season three times during her career, and helped lead the Lady Wildcats to the Super Regional round of the NCAA tournament in 2005. A three-time all-Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference first-team honoree – earning the moniker in three straight seasons from 2003-05 – McCoy finished her playing career with 456 career strikeouts. She was inducted into the Bethune-Cookman Hall…
Craig Snider is well-known in the softball world as both a hitting coach and a recruiter. Over the last several months, though, the man known best with his title of Texas A&M’s assistant coach has gained acclaim in another category: Woodworking. A skill that he discovered a few years back, the quarantine period earlier this year gave Snider the perfect opportunity to hone his craft. “The cool part of this is very coachy of me, too,” Snider said recently. “You can’t skip steps. There’s one way this has to be done; there’s a process, and you have to fall in…
Who is she? Peyton Hedrick, a former infielder for the Abilene Christian Wildcats. What is she known for? Hedrick was a four-year standout shortstop during her playing career for the Wildcats, which stretched from 2015-18. Hedrick earned all-conference honors in each of her four years in Abilene, including first-team nominations in 2015 and 2017. She earned a pair of All-Region honors, also in ’15 and ’17, and was the ACU Female Athlete of the Year as a freshman. During her junior season, Hedrick was named an NFCA All-American Scholar Athlete. She finished her career with 47 career home runs and 156 career…
The 2020 season started on the wrong foot before the Missouri Tigers even hit the field. Penalized for the actions of a long-gone former student-athlete, the Tigers were hit with a 1-year postseason ban and would have to miss the NCAA tournament. With a chip on their shoulder and looking to prove a point, the Tigers began the season on a 9-game winning streak and were ranked in the coaches poll when the season abruptly ended. “[During the 2020 season], our whole mission was to play every single game as though it were a championship game,” Mizzou head coach Larissa…
Late last week, the Mid-American Conference (MAC) set a new conference softball schedule and established minimum requirements for postseason qualification. An email outlining the new changes was distributed to conference coaches last week. JWOS viewed a copy of the correspondence over the weekend. MAC teams will move to a 40-game conference schedule for the 2021 season, and coaches are being asked to prepare a recommendation on a format that contains 4-game conference series’. The 11-member league traditionally plays 3-game series’ and a total of twenty-one conference games in a season. Coaches that spoke to JWOS on the condition of anonymity…
Bucknell has named Bryce Neal as the program’s new assistant coach. Neal spent the 2020 season as the volunteer assistant coach at Arizona State, and will work with the Bucknell offense. He is the first assistant to join the Bison’s staff since Sarah Caffrey was hired as head coach in August. Neal was part of the coaching staff that led the Sun Devils to a 22-7 overall record during the abbreviated 2020 season, and helped guide the program to a top-5 national ranking in home runs. Neal previously worked as a private instructor in Arkansas and Missouri. He played collegiate…
Former Creighton head coach Mary Higgins and Wisconsin-Eau Claire leader Leslie Huntington have been elected to the National Fastpitch Coaches Association Hall of Fame as the Class of 2021. Higgins spent seventeen years as the head coach at Creighton, starting the program and later serving as both coach and women’s athletic director at the school. She collected 564 career wins and led the Blue Jays to two AIAW World Series appearances, as well as a pair of appearances in the NCAA’s Women’s College World Series. In addition to her coaching accomplishments, Higgins was the first Division I chair of the…
Kara Amundson was part of two Women’s College World Series teams during her playing career at DePaul. Now entering her ninth season as the head coach at Murray State, Amundson continues to work to build her program into a perennial postseason contender, one not dissimilar to that same DePaul team of the mid-2000s. Amundson’s squad finished with a 12-10 record during the shortened 2020 campaign and were feeling confident as they neared conference play. The COVID-19 pandemic brought an abrupt end to their season , but there are still aspects of the abbreviated year that Amundson intends for her team…
Florida State pitcher Kara Bilodeau has entered the NCAA’s transfer portal, sources confirmed to JWOS on Tuesday. Bilodeau finished her third collegiate season with the end of the abbreviated 2020 campaign. She made five appearances for the Seminoles during the shortened year, posting a 1.62 ERA and two strikeouts in 4.1 innings of work. In 2019, her sophomore year and first at FSU, Bilodeau appeared in eleven games in the circle for the Noles, with three starts. She posted a 1-0 record, a 2.39 ERA, and sixteen strikeouts in 14.2 innings of work during her inaugural season in Tallahassee. As…