Bullish in Durham
Inside Duke's Fast-Climbing Softball Powerhouse
Welcome to your weekend, friends and subscribers. We are starting a new feature at Coffey Grounds called Saturday Shorts, which will aim to be quick-hitting pieces on a wide array of topics. Please reach out with any suggestions or thoughts you have for future Shorts. We begin today with a shoutout to a team that saw its season close Friday night, but is nonetheless one of the most remarkable stories in college sports.
Meet the Duke women’s softball team. Feel free to ask them, “How in the world did you pull this off?”
Duke finished the 2024 season with a loss to 14th-seeded Alabama at the Women College World Series in Oklahoma City. The score was 2-1, and coming in the wake of Duke’s 14-1 drubbing by Oklahoma, the three-time defending national champions in the Blue Devils’ first WCWS game, it ended with a lot of tears and a heartfelt team huddle in their blue pinstriped uniforms before a sellout crowd at Devon Park. Duke finishes the year with a mark of 52-9, and a slew of firsts, among them its first ACC title and its first trip to the World Series, along a record victory total, all of it achieved in the seventh year of the program’s history. You read that correctly. Seven years is all it took for coach Marissa Young to build a powerhouse literally out of nothing.
A former Big Ten player of the year at Michigan, Young, an African-American in a sport that traditionally has skewed as white as basketball does black, was hired away from Triangle rival North Carolina, part of Duke’s initiative to expand athletic opportunities for women to get in compliance with Title IX regulations. How daunting was the challenge
?
Young not only had no practice facility, or staff or stadium. She had neither uniforms nor players to put into them. Her first recruit was a pitcher, Peyton St. George, who went on to be an All-American. In an interview with the Duke Chronicle, St. George remembered Young’s sales pitch.
“I wish I had a stadium to show you. I wish I had a locker room to show you. I have nothing to show you. But I need you to trust me to know that I want to build this program around you and we're gonna go some really far places.”
It was no overstatement. Duke went 29-27 in its first season in 2018, and dipped just under .500 the following year, before a breakout season in Covid-shortened 2020, when they went 23-4 and made their first NCAA tournament.
The program continued its upward trajectory from there, Young not merely proving herself to be a gifted teacher, motivator and recruiter, but providing her players with
a life lesson in grace and strength amid adversity, never more so than during last year’s NCAA tournament, when her husband, James Lamar, suffered a heart attack that left him on life support and wound up requiring multiple surgeries as well as heart and kidney transplants. Lamar remains in a wheelchair, and still has a long stretch of recovery ahead, but was able to make it to Oklahoma City for the World Series this year. Somehow Young has managed to balance the disparate roles of caretaker, coach and mother of four children.
"Softball has been our life since we met," Young told ESPN prior to the Alabama game. "He's a big reason why I'm here as a coach. He's been our biggest fan and super invested. I'm just glad that he was able to enjoy and experience this with us. ... Just really special."
In another ESPN interview, Casey Curd, Duke’s ace pitcher who yielded only four hits in the loss to Alabama, called Young “one of the strongest women I've ever met. She shows up to the field with a smile on her face, gives us her full attention. ... It's super inspiring."
Marissa Young, master program builder and the first Black coach to lead a team to the WCWS, was fond of calling her 2024 Blue Devils Team Seven. It’s unlikely anyone will underestimate Team Eight.
“Coach (has held) us to the same standard from Day One,” senior Kelly Torres said. “It's cool to come out as the most decorated class in Duke softball history. Seven years is very young for a program. This is not the last you're going to see of Duke softball."
Yet another inspirational story Wayne!