How did the Duke and Clemson softball teams get this good this quickly?

Duke softball
By Nicole Auerbach
May 19, 2023

The inaugural Duke softball recruiting class always will hold a special place in Marissa Young’s heart. And she’ll always remember the player on that team who didn’t know how to ride a bike. And the one who didn’t know how to swim.

That handful of players didn’t have any games to play as the school built its program, quite literally, from the ground up; at the time, Duke was busy trying to turn the northwest corner of East Campus into a softball stadium. The players who committed to practicing for — but yet not competing for — Young spent their days getting better on the turf baseball field. They simulated game situations. They lifted weights and got stronger. But there’s only so much they could do as they worked toward their actual first season.

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So, Young and her coaching staff decided they all would train for a sprint triathlon. Players, too. Even the ones who didn’t know how to bike or swim.

“I wanted them to have something that they were training for and working toward — and also something they could compete at,” Young recalls. “None of us had ever done one. Softball players aren’t great swimmers or runners.”

She laughed …

“It was a neat challenge and allowed us to really lay the groundwork of what we wanted our culture and our foundation to be when the rest of the group came on campus the next year,” she added. “It was really important.”

Now, it’s 2023 and Duke is in its sixth season of competition, set to appear in a third consecutive NCAA Tournament this weekend. The Blue Devils earned the No. 8 seed — the highest they have been ranked — which means if they advance through the regional, they’ll get to host a super-regional round in Durham. Duke’s Team Six, as these Blue Devils call themselves, is 45-10 this season.

Clemson’s program is even younger; it only has competed since 2020. The Tigers are seeded 16th, which means they’re hosting a regional round, too, for the second consecutive season. The Tigers, led by two-time ACC player of the year Valerie Cagle, are 45-8. Like their counterparts at Duke, the Tigers have plugged and played transfers who provided an immediate boost. The loosening of transfer rules and the implementation of the transfer portal to make it easier than ever to jump in couldn’t have come at a better time for a program in its infancy.

These two programs are young yet wildly successful, emblematic of a growing sport that has rewarded investment. Both schools needed to add a women’s sport to comply with Title IX, and both chose softball because they believed it could succeed.

“It was kind of a surprise that Clemson didn’t have softball already,” Clemson athletic director Graham Neff said. “It’s right, geographically, for us and our high school associations and even our baseball tradition and prominence. All of that adds up that, competitively, we should be good. … It fit our region, our ability to recruit, our brand and our culture. It originated as a competitive play, to introduce a sport we thought we could be really good at.”

Clemson softball
Valerie Cagle’s .457 batting average ranks tied for seventh nationally, and her 1.20 ERA ranks 13th. (Courtesy of Clemson athletics)

Neff was part of the hiring committee, led by then-athletic director Dan Radakovich. Back in 2017, the group hired John Rittman, who previously was the head coach at Stanford and had spent a decade as part of the U.S. National Team coaching staff. Like Young at Duke, Rittman was involved in all of the early stages of program-building, from providing input on the stadium and other facility needs to the budget. He had six players who signed on for what Neff refers to as “Year Zero” — a season of eligibility without any real competition.

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Rittman describes a makeshift triathlon he had his players train for — although theirs involved kayaking and the weight room as opposed to a more traditional format. Clemson also hosted cooking competitions and planned team outings, such as one the Tigers took to an Atlanta Braves game. Radakovich refers to that stretch as the “player acquisition time period.” (One of the original six players initially committed to Radakovich before he had hired a coach and played three years for the Tigers.)

Those six players helped recruit future classes. They set the culture. They understood the program ethos. They could sell Rittman’s vision. He would show recruits renderings of the stadium, and “They could picture what the program was going to be like.”

And, a year after he got to Clemson, the portal began. Suddenly, a young program with institutional backing and financial support had a shot for its roster to get older faster. While the Tigers’ first season ended abruptly with the COVID-19 pandemic, later teams benefitted from the extra year of eligibility across the sport that allowed veteran players to keep playing.

As Neff describes it, the original plan was to give the softball program a long runway to get up to speed competitively. But … the Tigers earned a national seed and hosted a regional in just their third competitive season.

“Our main objective was to be competitive out of the out of the gate,” Rittman said. “Our main objective was to build a culture and a foundation that could help us be successful without worrying about wins and losses, but as we started to recruit and we started to bring in the players and the transfers, it quickly became kind of a mantra of ours to shock the world.

“They didn’t want to wait. They were not patient. … And, obviously, it helped to get Valerie Cagle.”

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Duke athletic director Nina King, who worked with softball since its inception under her predecessor, Kevin White, said so much of the Blue Devils’ success came down to similar things. They, too, hired a coach who was uniquely prepared for the ground-up build, someone who could communicate her vision to attract the type of talent the team needed to compete.

Duke’s academic rigors make it more challenging to take transfers, so high school recruiting has been critical. Young never had been a head coach at the Division I level, but she coached as an assistant down the road at North Carolina and had been a three-time All-American as a player at Michigan.

King remembers thinking during the hiring process how important it would be to hire a coach who was both willing to pause their career — at least, the day-to-day coaching and game preparation part — to build a program from scratch. And the program needed a coach who could handle the number of losses that may come in the early years as the program got its bearings.

“We were thinking about who was going to come in and be ready to handle slow progress because it’s a build,” King said. “But, wow. She’s been amazing. … I have to stop saying it’s a program she’s building. Because she’s built it.”

King says she groups softball in with women’s basketball, gymnastics and volleyball as sports that have grown massively in recent years and appear poised to take off even further. Softball, she says, is one that’s easy for fans to grab hold of. It’s fun. It’s fast-paced. The players cheer throughout the game, offering a soundtrack of excitement to go along with the action. It’s great for fans of all ages in person and on television.

Clemson’s season tickets for its first season sold out within a week. Neff says his department already is working on expanding Clemson’s stadium; the Tigers have 1,000 fixed seats and a berm in the outfield that fans can sit on. They already have doubled the berm seating and are “about a year away” from adding approximately 600 fixed seats to the stadium.

That is a significant data point to Clemson, even for a sport that isn’t yet breaking even due to its associated costs, such as coaching salaries, scholarships, facilities and travel. But it explains why it makes good business sense to invest in a sport like this, one that has attracted and retained fan interest locally and nationally.

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Last year’s Women’s College World Series-clinching win for Oklahoma outdrew college baseball’s title clincher. Softball may not always be more popular than baseball on certain campuses, but it has drawn fans and changed their behaviors.

“The revenue generated has tripled — far exceeded — what our original estimates were,” Neff said. “It’s significantly more than we anticipated, which has shifted our mindset a little bit. As we continue to invest in that sport, the revenue associated with it is part of running the department.

“That’s in the same vein as TV metrics that show the growth of women’s sports, their prominence, and sponsorships and so on. It’s kind of behind the scenes, but it speaks to our investment and desire to continue to invest in softball.”


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Women’s College World Series 2023 Live updates and results: Bracket, schedule, rankings and latest news

(Top photo: Courtesy of Duke athletics)

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Nicole Auerbach

Nicole Auerbach covers college football and college basketball for The Athletic. A leading voice in college sports, she also serves as a studio analyst for the Big Ten Network and a radio host for SiriusXM. Nicole was named the 2020 National Sports Writer of the Year by the National Sports Media Association, becoming the youngest national winner of the prestigious award. Before joining The Athletic, she covered college football and college basketball for USA Today. Follow Nicole on Twitter @NicoleAuerbach