Jennifer Patrick-Swift was not a name that many people knew in 2011. That was when the former Methodist College first baseman was hired to be the head coach at the second-smallest school at the Division 1 level, Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania.
An institution with undergraduate enrollment at roughly 1,700, the Red Flash had won just ten games in 2011. On the hunt for a new head coach who could turn their program around, the focus centered on Patrick-Swift. Then the head coach at Division II school Seton Hill, Patrick-Swift agreed to take the reins of the Red Flash and begin the rebuilding process.
In Patrick-Swift’s first season as head coach, the Red Flash enjoyed twenty-two victories, a 12-win improvement over the previous year, and led the program to a higher win total every year as her career stretched on. The Red Flash posted a record of 26-23 in 2014; inauspicious, perhaps, but it was the program’s first winning record under Patrick-Swift’s tutelage and the sign of things to come.
It was the middle of 2015 when Patrick-Swift decided that her offense needed a change. “When the game changed, I knew I had to, too,” she said. “It was mid-March of 2015 and we were coming home from a conference road trip. All of our power was going foul and then we’d ground out. That was our theme of the season up to that point. So I knew if all of my hitters were doing it that it was something we either weren’t teaching or, most likely, were teaching and needed to change.”
And change they did. Patrick-Swift spent a 10-hour bus ride researching to figure out just what tweaks her hitters could make and came across Bobby Tewksbary. An independent hitting coach, Patrick-Swift took a few of Tewksbary’s tips to the batting cage with one of her players and gave them a try. The result?
“She went out and hit missiles.”
Throughout the rest of that season, some of the Red Flash hitters elected to make their own tweaks, and in the following fall, the entire team became part of the hitting revamp. What followed was remarkable – Eighty-one home runs in 2016, up from just thirty long balls the prior campaign.
As her team got better, especially on the offensive side of the ball, Patrick-Swift decided her team needed to get out of their comfort zones and face off against some of the game’s “big dogs”.
“From my first year in 2012, we played Pittsburgh and Penn State at their place every year,” Patrick-Swift said. “So we got an idea of the stadium feel at those places, but we didn’t play well there early on because the kids got caught up in the big school name… I knew that, to get where we needed to be and where we were building to, we had to play in more of those venues so we could get comfortable and change the expectations of the girls from ‘I hope we beat them’ to ‘We’re going to beat them.'”
As the Saint Francis program continued its climb, the Red Flash did begin to record wins over some Power Five and big-market teams. At the same time, though, the squad defied expectations even in losses, as they played teams like Georgia and Auburn tightly and forced the SEC foes to scrape out victories. Despite the tally mark in the loss column, Patrick-Swift saw growth in her players from those defeats: “[That was] another huge step for the program, competing like that against national powers. In 2016, we posted a school-record 34 wins and got 100% belief from the girls that they could play anyone, anywhere in the country.”
In 2017, the Red Flash went 49-11, blowing away the previous single-season wins record, set just the year before. Recording victories over Fordham, Tulsa, and Texas Tech in the non-conference season, as well as a pair of wins over Penn State to truly bring full-circle Patrick-Swift’s transformation of the program, the team earned the Northeast Conference’s automatic bid to the NCAA tournament and recorded the first-ever postseason victory in the program’s history, with an 8-4 victory over New Mexico State in Tucson, Arizona.
A mom of three in addition to being a collegiate head coach, Patrick-Swift has little trouble articulating her approach to balancing her work and home lives: “One of my top professional goals is to show female student-athletes that you can have a career, including coaching, and be good at [both coaching and being a mom]. The phrase ‘work/life balance’ needs to go away. To me, it’s being 100% present right where your feet are. You’re going to spend more time at work during your season, which makes it that much more crucial when I’m home and in “mom mode” to truly focus on my own three girls. Conversely, when I’m in “coach mode”, I am completely focused on my girls at work. When situations arise at either home or work, those are times when I need to multi-task and I do that. But those are exceptions, not the norm, so I don’t beat myself up over them. I just try to be the best “mom” that I can, every second of every day to my twenty-one girls, because that number encompasses both.”
On Saturday, Patrick-Swift was announced as the new head coach at North Carolina State, where she’ll take over the ACC program and put her offensive approach in place at a Power Five school for the first time in her career, continuing her career’s meteoric ascent.
