University of Massachusets Athletics
Coaching Still Has Mass Appeal
May 26, 2006 | Softball
May 26, 2006
The photograph on Page 57 of the University of Massachusetts softball media guide features 17 players, two student managers, and an assistant coach. Their hair is short, typically feathered back in a style popular in 1980. The fact that the photograph is black and white mercifully conceals the powder blue stripe on the maroon polyester uniforms. All 20 individuals are staring at the camera.
Then there is first-year head coach Elaine Sortino standing uncomfortably in her sweat suit in the back right, looking into the distance. She seems to be less posing for the photograph than enduring it.
Twenty-six years later, Sortino is still coaching at UMass, still brimming with energy. There is an urgency about her. She regards time as opportunity, and if it's not spent trying to learn and improve, then it is a wasted gift.
It's not that she's averse to enjoying the moment. She has a hearty laugh, and life often touches her to tears. In conversation, she is intensely present with an eye contact that bears in on people like a riding fastball. On the field, she believes in the Zen coaching cliches about the precious present.
Now is pretty darn good for Sortino and the Minutewomen. They are 40-14, one of only 16 Division 1 teams still standing from the 275 that began play a few months back. In the 25th year of the NCAA Tournament, UMass is making its 16th appearance, and 12th in a row, figures unapproached by schools in the Northeast. Should the Minutewomen upset fourth-ranked Northwestern in the best-of-three ``Super Regional" that begins today in Evanston, Ill., they would advance to the eight-team College World Series for the fourth time.
But basking in these heady achievements would go against Sortino's code. There is no looking back, no standing still. She simply doesn't believe in the rearview mirror. Her foot is on the gas, pressing hard.
``This sounds crazy, but I'm already thinking about what I'm going to say when this season is over to prepare them for next year," said Sortino. ``You can't do things the way you did them last year and expect to be good this year. And if you don't change, you're a fool.
``I tell the kids, `The day that you're comfortable, and you can put your shoulders back on the chair, is the day you should stop.' "
Elaine Sortino is nowhere near that day.
A sure sign From the beginning, her softball career has been defined by restlessness. When she went to Oneonta State in the '70s, she did so as a point guard, ``a CYO basketball geek." In January of her freshman year, though, she started to panic. In a few weeks, she would have nothing to do. ``It was still basketball season," she said, ``but I was always planning ahead: `What am I going to do next?' "
She never played softball and felt uncomfortable approaching the coach with her sudden ambition to become a catcher. Instead, she rapped on the door of the well-regarded baseball coach, Don Axtell.
Axtell, now 73, says this was the only time in his 30 years of coaching at Oneonta that he worked with a softball player, but he couldn't help but be impressed by the kid from Yonkers. He gave up his lunch hours and taught her the basics of putting on shin guards, throwing, and blocking pitches in the dirt.
A few weeks later at softball tryouts, there was catcher Elaine Sortino, reporting for duty.
She enjoyed catching, she says, because ``I liked being in charge," and because ``I got to deal with this `pitcher thing.' " She sensed that a good softball pitcher could exert more influence on the outcome of a game -- and a season -- than anyone in team sports. She loved working with pitchers, and began a lifelong study of what it took, mechanically and psychologically, to be great.
When her playing days were done, she got a coaching job at Yale: some volleyball, some basketball, some softball. After soaking up two years of rarefied Ivy League life, she landed at UMass, coming home, as it were, to a place she'd never been before.
``I love UMass," she says. ``It's stupid, isn't it? It's goofy. I tell the kids all the time, `You should never love something that can't love you back.' And here's me."
Her first team in 1980 was an experienced and talented crew dealing with their third coach in as many years. ``They were a handful," Sortino recalled. ``Good grief. I wasn't much older than them, and they were testing every corpuscle in my body."
There were curfews, followed by curfew violations, followed by early Sunday morning practices. The challenge was on.
``She had to earn our respect and she did," acknowledged Fran Cornacchioli, the senior shortstop on that team, who now counts Sortino as a friend. ``I'm sure we gave her a few gray hairs, as well as those first few wins."
That team made it to the AIAW World Series (the NCAA took over softball in 1982).
Sortino's work since has been defined by year-in, year-out excellence. She has never had a losing season at UMass. The dozen straight NCAA Tournament appearances are by far the most of any team on campus, tying the Temple men's basketball team from 1990-2001 for the longest string by any team in any sport in Atlantic 10 history. Nationally, her record of 935-402-4 makes her the 11th-winningest coach in college softball history. In 2004, she was inducted into the National Fastpitch Coaches Association Hall of Fame, all of which she greets with an emphatic ``Onward."
``She's always trying to do better," said legendary Florida State coach JoAnne Graf, winner of more than 1,100 games. ``That's what makes a good coach great. They are not satisfied. Elaine has kept up with that, and kept her fire."
Change for the better That fire blazes around a painstaking eye for detail. Many players have gone through the Sortino makeover, where she analyzes the mechanics of their swing or pitching delivery. She zeroes in on the slightest imperfections, tweaks and tweaks, and requires repetition after repetition. This is an exacting process, and not an exciting one to watch (Sortino likens it to ``watching a lake evaporate"), but players respond.
Whitney Mollica arrived from New Hampshire this year and struggled in the fall to refine her hitting stroke in the way Sortino and top assistant Kaila Holtz advised. In time, though, she adapted to the wide stance, to keeping her hands inside the ball and keeping the barrel of the bat through the hitting zone as long as possible. Mollica hit over .400, set a league record for RBIs, and earned both A-10 Freshman of the Year and Player of the Year honors.
Players buy into the regimen, in part because they have been won over by Sortino's personality (Mollica calls her ``the most loving, caring person"), and in part because of her track record of working with players.
Welcome back As closely tied to UMass as Sortino is (with 935 of the program's 1,001 wins), it's hard to imagine her leaving. In 1996, though, she did just that. For years, she had been combining coaching with administrative work (even now she serves as the associate athletic director and the senior women's administrator), and those responsibilities were growing. She had just spent three years as the program director for the Division 1 Volleyball Final Four, which UMass hosted. The athletic department was also hosting a series of A-10 championships, around the edges of cumbersome recertification work. Former athletic director Bob Marcum was grooming Sortino as a possible successor, and urging her to work for him full time. Being an AD was something she had often fancied. After all, she likes to run the show.
On an anguished April afternoon, she brought the team together, and told them she was stepping down at season's end, and that associate head coach Mona Stevens would take over. ``As soon as she started to speak, there wasn't a dry eye in the room," recalled former UMass star pitcher Danielle Henderson. ``We were in absolute shock."
Sortino made it through the season, cried for days afterward, and tried to move on, convincing herself this was the right decision, overriding her gut feeling day after day. One day in August, she got a call from Stevens, telling her news that sent her jaw dropping: The University of Utah, Stevens's alma mater, had just lost its coach, and it wanted Stevens to come home.
Sitting down with Marcum, Sortino felt sick to her stomach for her players. ``Well," said Marcum, ``I know where we can find another coach."
Sortino looked up, gleefully. ``Really?" she said.
At first, Marcum wrote ``Interim" on her contract, and Sortino nearly popped a gasket. ``Interim?" she says even now with indignation. ``Are you kidding me?"
In the 1997 season, injected with even more energy (and Henderson's pitching), Sortino led UMass back to the College World Series, and then again in 1998. Eight years later, she is a challenging weekend from getting back to the sport's biggest showcase one more time.
It's easy to picture her response if her team should win the whole thing. Elaine Sortino would have her arms around her players' shoulders. She would be crying her eyes out, then stopping to smell the congratulatory roses, one deep and delicious sniff before moving on with vigor to the next season.