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 getting my feet wet on the softball beat. Names like Madison Uden, Faith Canfield, and Tera Blanco were green in my brain at that time. I thought I was starting to get a hang of this softball thing, but I knew the real test would be interviewing Hutch for the first time. Growing up in Ann Arbor and following Michigan athletics reasonably closely, Carol Hutchins was a ubiquitous name held highly in the mind of anyone who cared about sports in this city. Even if softball was far from your favorite thing, you knew that Michigan Softball was good and you knew Carol Hutchins was why. "Hutch" was the reason that softball meant something more to Michigan than a typical non-rev. "Hutch" was why Michigan was nationally competitive in softball in the 1990s and early 2000s, a time when good softball was so rarely found east of the Rockies. And "Hutch" was why Michigan was nationally competitive into the mid-2010s, even as the sport had taken a decisively southern turn. Hutch had an intense demeanor to her on the field and off of it. That's why, as I walked into the UM softball complex that day, I was intimidated. Of course, I first had to find the dang softball lounge inside a building I'd never entered, but after that, yeah, I was nervous. Most everyone I've talked to who covered softball in some capacity, be it for WCBN, the Daily, BTN Student U, or WOLV TV, was nervous the first time they interviewed Hutch. A wise man might have called it a rite of passage among student media members. [Bryan Fuller] I don't recall what questions I asked the first time I interviewed Hutch too well. Really it was me trying to get acclimated. Some basic questions about what I'd seen in Tampa, how the team looked, that sort of thing. I may have stammered ever so slightly, or rushed my words as a result of the nervousness, but Hutch answered them honestly. The passion in her eyes burned brightly and the steely visage was present but the answers she gave were thoughtful and fair. She didn't Bill Belichick the responses or laugh them off, because she knew I was from the one outlet who traveled to Tampa and appreciated that. That's the thing you learned about Hutch pretty quickly being on the beat: no one cared more about softball than Carol Hutchins and Carol Hutchins took softball seriously. She wanted you to take softball seriously. She wanted it to be treated like the big dollar men's sports in the media and if she could tell that you knew your stuff, she could tolerate the hard question. But if you asked Hutch something tough and it's clear you didn't know what you were talking about? Hutch would rip you apart like a pack wolves and a freshly slain carcass. Over my next three years at Michigan, I attended the pre-season softball media availability three times. Each time I was now a "veteran" on the beat, and the student journalists from the Daily were always freshmen. The fun part for me was seeing which ones would ask the right questions and which ones would show their lack of knowledge and eaten alive (my second favorite part, just behind seeing Hutch's golden retriever wandering around). When one unsuspecting freshman asked the superficial question exposing they hadn't done their homework, I enjoyed chuckling as the snappy response back was something of a verbal slap across the face, even if I felt bad when the reporter's face turned red. That was learning on the job covering Hutch. I'm not going to act like I was the expert in interviewing Carol Hutchins. I was a radio announcer, not a beat writer, one who did lots of games, yes, but my job wasn't to collect interviews. We featured them from time to time on our podcast but anyone who spent a full year on the Daily softball beat interviewed Hutch as many times in one year as I did in four. But what I got to see in doing it for four years was a closer look at the program, the traits that defined it, and the leadership Carol Hutchins provided, even in her final years. I got a certain connection to the program and its players, one that hasn't left me, making me continue to write softball for this site into year five (and soon, year six), even if the clicks mostly go to my other responsibilities. Softball matters to me and it always will, and that's what I gained covering Hutch. [AFTER THE JUMP: A look back at Carol Hutchins' career]