On August 24, 2022, longtime Michigan Softball coach Carol Hutchins announced her retirement after 38 seasons at the helm of the program. She departs as the only face that Michigan Softball has ever had, the winningest coach in D1 Softball history, and a living legend of the game. I have covered Michigan Softball in some capacity for five seasons and took the past two months crafting this piece, my (and this site's) authoritative goodbye to a Michigan icon. My hope is that readers find it a reasonable send-off to a coach who often seemed larger than life to cover. I first met Carol Hutchins in person in the second week of February 2018. It was the second Michigan Softball media availability of the season. I, a freshman member of WCBN Sports Radio at the University of Michigan, was there to ask some questions and perhaps get a few soundbites for our station's softball podcast. I had covered the team's opening weekend tournament down in Tampa, Florida, and was just getti
Feb 26, 2021
Haylie Wagner, Gwen Svekis and Victoria Hayward all ran into one another’s arms upon the final out of their softball season, on Sept. 28. Wagner was the starting pitcher, Svekis her catcher and Hayward the center fielder, and theirs was the standard embrace of teammates winning a championship game: exhaustion mixed with joy, streaked with happy tears. Except that this situation was not standard at all. Almost a year earlier, they had been the first three players to sign on with an upstart, experimental league; and while they were, for this moment, on the same squad, they’d separated and rejoined sporadically over the course of the six-week season, acting as teammates one week and opponents the next. Though they had just won the final game of the season together, they had not won a championship. In fact, no team title was awarded. Instead, players were ranked individually, using a unique scoring system, and the lone gold medal went to one of their teammates, the staf