TRENDING NOW: NCAA TRANSFER TRACKER / COLLEGE COACHING TRACKER
Back in 2006, a young right-handed pitcher from Morrison, Illinois donned a Northern Iowa uniform for the first time. Monica Wright started 26 games for the Panthers, led the team in strikeouts and in wins.
Even though her inaugural year of college softball was a successful one, other factors led Wright to make the decision to transfer to another school. She ultimately landed at Indiana, where she went on to a career that saw her name finish in the top ten in four statistical categories in Hoosier program lore.
As she was finishing her playing career at Indiana, Wright knew she wanted to stay around the game that she loved. She embarked on a coaching career immediately out of school, joining the staff at Elon University as the Phoenix’s pitching coach.
After one year at Elon, Wright returned to the Midwest as the pitching coach at Bowling Green, and it was there that she really came into her own as a pitching coach. During a 4-year stint leading the program’s hurlers, Wright’s staff led the Mid-American Conference in ERA three consecutive years.
Wright took her third career pitching coach job at Valparaiso ahead of the 2016 season. She went to work with the Crusaders’ pitching staff, guiding them to a team ERA that was more than four runs lower than the same number in the previous season. Opponent’s batting average dropped more than one hundred points, and the walks and home runs allowed by the Valpo pitchers were cut down by nearly half.
The Crusaders won the Horizon League Championship that same year and played in the NCAA tournament. Two years later, Wright was part of the Valpo coaching staff that helped guide the program through a transition from the Horizon League to the Missouri Valley Conference, where they finished fourth in their first season of play.
Never a spotlight-hungry coach, Wright maintained a fairly low profile through the years, but her name popped up on the radar for some head coaching positions from time to time. As her pitching staffs performed well, Wright’s acumen as a coach was continually proven.
Then, in the summer of 2020 as the pandemic raged onward, an interesting happenstance entered the picture.
Due to some pandemic-related factors, current Northern Iowa head coach Ryan Jacobs would have only one full-time assistant on his coaching staff for the immediate future. He needed a pitching coach and he needed someone that could help him guide the team.
He called Wright.
Being conference opponents, the two had known each other for a while. Wright had maintained her love for Cedar Falls, even after spending just one year there several years prior, but even still, the decision was not an easy one.
“When the opportunity came up, it was a really prayerful decision that came about in the midst of the chaos of everything,” Wright said at the time. “Moving in conference is never easy, and I loved my kids at Valpo… [the decision to go to UNI]wasn’t made without a lot of prayer and a lot of God-direction.”
Ultimately, the match was made, and fifteen years after she had initially donned a UNI uniform, Wright was a Panther once again.
In her first season at UNI, Wright has helped engineer a really solid performance for the UNI pitching staff. Former UMKC transfer Kailyn Packard has turned into a bonafide ace for the Panthers, posting a 1.62 ERA and 21 wins in the lion’s share of the workload for her team. The staff as a whole has an ERA under 3.40 and has struck out 270 batters this season. Both numbers are significantly lower than the most recently-comparable stats from 2019.
A second-place finish in the Missouri Valley regular-season standings, the Panthers finished as conference tournaments runners-up but were selected to the NCAA tournament with an at-large bid after an impressive season. The group will take on an even-matched regional that includes Missouri, Iowa State, and Illinois-Chicago, in addition to UNI.
When she left Northern Iowa as a player after that 2006 season, Wright couldn’t have expected that her future journey through the game of softball would ultimately take her back to Cedar Falls. But as the old saying goes, sometimes God has a sense of humor and sometimes he’ll put you back where it all began.
