University of Massachusets Athletics
Sortino Reaches 800 Wins
April 28, 2003 | Softball
April 28, 2003
Elaine Sortino didn't get much time to revel in win No. 1 of her stroied University of Massachusetts coaching career.
After beating Lowell on the road on April 1, 1980, the UMass softball team had a postgame meal at a nearby restaurant and was preparing to leave, when the door came off.
The Minutewomen had traveled to the northeastern Massachusetts college in two university vans. As half her team loaded into the one she was driving, the sliding door on the side of the van came off the track.
After several minutes of playing yank-and-fidget with the dangling door, the group realized it wasn't going back on the normal way.
"We had to wire it back on to the side of the van," Sortino said laughing and rolling her eyes at the memory. "The kids were holding it with ace bandages and it was wired shut with coat-hangers. I was so nervous it was going to fall off."
The door stayed on for the entire trip back to Amherst. In over 1,100 career games in the 23 years she has been the UMass softball coach, Sortino has never lost a door. She's lost 350 games, but the ride home has always remained fully enclosed.
In the same time period she's won an awful lot of games and on a March afternoon in Philadelphia if the Minutewomen could sweep their doubleheader with La Salle, she'd become just the 16th coach in NCAA history (13th in Division I) to win 800 games.
Sortino has victories against teams from the University of Maine to San Diego State, from Oregon to Florida State and quite a few outposts in between. Temple (51) and Rhode Island (61) represent over 100 wins by themselves, while 150 different players have participated in the victories.
The first one is still fresh in her memory.
"It was a real sunny day and we just hit the ball all over the place," Sortino said. "It wasn't even a contest."
Sortino, then in her mid 20s, wasn't surprised. She knew she'd been dealt a good hand. After coaching at Yale for two years she took over a Minutewoman team that had gone 26-2-1 under Chet Gladchuk, now the athletic director at Navy.
"With how talented they were with all the players they had returning, I remember hoping that I could be a good enough coach for the talent that the team had," Sortino said. "I distinctly remember thinking that the whole way to Lowell."
Back then Sortino coached both softball and volleyball and shared an office and a telephone with fellow UMass coaching legend Pam Hixon, who had field hockey and lacrosse.
"One phone for four sports. How about that?" she mused. "I'd go out on the roof at Totman when the volleyball team was getting their water breaks in the gym and I'd yell down to the softball field things for them to do or to work on."
Despite the unpalacial workspace, she proved to be a good enough coach for the talent, that year and every one since. The Minutewomen went 23-3 in 1980 and advanced to the school's first ever Women's College World Series.
Sortino has hit quite a few numerical milestones since then. A plaque commemorating win No. 700 hangs in her office, but Sortino wasn't excited about that win, a regular season win over La Salle, and doesn't care much about No. 800 either.
Sortino reached the milestone with an 11-2 five-inning victory over La Salle in the second game of a doubleheader sweep of the Explorers.
"Quite frankly, it doesn't feel like anything. It's not like winning a conference championship," she said. "I think it's nice to have won so many games. I'd rather have won them than have lost them, but it really doesn't feel like there is any significance.
"Nothing is inevitable. People assume a lot of things are going to happen," she said. "Someone should be inside my stomach during the game. They should see what my heart rate is like, what the acidity of my stomach is. I think every contest, especially the ones we're supposed to win, are difficult."
It's that approach, that attention to detail, that has kept the Minutewomen successful and the doors on.
