Jackson Vaughan: The Secret To Linfield Softball's Success
Jackson
Vaughan reflects on two decades of Linfield softball success and how football
strikes an unlikely balance.
Feb 2, 2021 by Mark Allister
Posted at FloSoftball
Mark Allister is the author of 'Women's College Softball on the Ride: A Season Inside the Game.'
McMinnville, Oregon lies 40 miles southwest of Portland and is home to Linfield College. The Wildcats powerhouse DIII football program hasn’t had a losing season in 64 years, the longest such streak (by far) in NCAA history, in any division. Jackson Vaughan has been part of the coaching staff for the past 24 years of that streak; and in 2015, he was honored as the NCAA Division III Defensive Coordinator of the Year by the website FootballScoop.
Why begin a softball article talking
about football? Because Vaughan is also Linfield's head softball coach. In 18
seasons piloting softball, he has assembled a 665-169-3 record, been named
Northwest Conference Coach of the Year 11 times, West Region Coach of the Year
six times, and NCAA Division III Coach of the Year twice, after his Linfield
teams won the 2007 and 2011 NCAA Division III national championships.
Coaching football and softball,
Vaughan has dual positions that no one else in college sports currently has. I
asked him about the differences and similarities in coaching men and women.
“To
me, the differences aren’t what most people perceive — coaching is coaching,
and all players no matter the sport want to get better, they want feedback,
they want to be supported. And there’s no difference in toughness.”
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Jackson Vaughan
Vaughan does say that in both
programs the players want to work hard, but the female athletes are more driven
off the field: “It’s rare when we have a female athlete who isn’t driven to
excel in the classroom. The guys are sometimes still trying to find their way a
little bit — football’s been a major part of their identity but they don’t know
yet what they really want to do in school or after.” Vaughan’s experience of
each sport as a coach, however, is different.
“Without question, football has more
strategy to it,” Vaughan said, “and that’s my allure. It’s a chess match where
things vary all the time, not just opponent from week to week, but every play
with down and distance. There’s so much scheme orientation to it. Softball does
have a strategy, but so often the strategy is the one-on-one battle between
pitcher and hitter, or setting up situational defenses, or planning how to approach
a particular pitcher. Softball to me is the ultimate technique sport because it
comes down to your players’ skills that they can perform at any given moment.”
If intellectual strategizing is
football’s allure, Vaughan is drawn to softball’s possibilities for cultivating
relationships. “With a small roster,” he said, “I can meet individually with my
softball players. We get to know everyone when we go on the road. There are
short moments of dead time during practice between hitting stations, for example,
and so I get to talk to them then. At Linfield, we have 125 players on our
football roster, and we’re running our program more like a big business or the
military where you need to be very efficient with no wasted minute. So it’s
bang-bang-bang — you practice, take a break, then meet to view film. Softball’s
different.”
Growing up as a boy, Vaughan knew
nothing of fastpitch softball. When he was in fifth grade, his family moved to
a 10,000 acre cattle ranch in the tiny town of Hereford, in eastern Oregon.
Playing sports was difficult since the nearest neighbor was two miles away and
the local school didn’t have enough students for anything but a basketball
team. In his senior year, he had the itch to do something bigger, so he moved
to nearby Baker City. The high school there had over 600 students and played
football, which he wanted to do.
After graduation, Vaughan, who had a
4.0 GPA, decided to pursue football and an education across the state at
Linfield, a small liberal arts college. After playing one year and then having
a major knee injury from which he didn’t recover, he ended his brief collegiate
career. But the football staff was impressed enough by Vaughan that they
offered him a coaching position in football as a student assistant, which he did
as a junior and senior.
Vaughan majored in accounting and
imagined heading off to make some money in a career. “I went on some job
interviews,” Vaughan said, “and realized that being in those environments
wasn’t really what I wanted. So I came back for a fifth year at Linfield, took
some Education classes, did my student teaching, got a teaching certificate,
and continued to help out with Linfield football. At that point, I thought I’d
teach and coach at a high school somewhere, but a job opened up at Linfield and
I was hired.”
Many head softball coaches have had
winding and even surprising career paths; they’ve had personal journeys that
take them hither and yon. Vaughan’s journey might also be considered
surprising, but it stayed within the confines of the Linfield athletics
complex. A year after Vaughan was hired as a football coach, in 1999, the head
softball coach, Laura Kenow, needed some help and got authorization to hire an
assistant. Wanting a bit more money than he was making coaching only football,
Vaughan applied and got the job when Linfield combined a football-softball
position.
Three years later, Kenow decided to
step aside. A professor in the Health, Human Performance, and Athletics
department, she wanted to focus more on her academic interests. Vaughan hadn’t
really thought before then about being a head coach — he was simply enjoying
being an assistant and getting to know the game better — but some of the
players approached the Athletic Director and asked that Vaughan be named head
coach. And it happened. For the 2002 season, Linfield had a new head coach, who
was still learning the game, who was still very young. But people I’ve talked
to say that Vaughan is a sponge who soaks up good ideas from everywhere. He
would need to.
“I learned a lot from Coach Kenow,”
Vaughan said, “and from players, but I knew I had a great deal to learn. So
when I was offered the job I asked for extra money to buy videos and books to
help my softball education. I also learned from watching other teams,
particularly Pacific Lutheran who was in our conference and coached really well
by Rick Noren.” What Vaughan also had going for him is that he brought to his
softball coaching some ideas from football.
In the Northwest in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, the dominant DIII softball program was Pacific Lutheran
University. In 2002, for example, the Lutes went undefeated in the Northwest
Conference and 36-2 overall, won their regional, and finished fourth in the
national championship. In 2003, PLU went 32-3, winning their fifth straight
conference championship and advancing once again to the national tournament.
Their dominance was ending, however, though no one knew it at the time.
Becoming
Great
In Vaughan’s first two years as head
coach of softball, Linfield improved, including going 21-5 in conference in
2003. But 2004 would mark the first of several breakthroughs, when Linfield
went 26-2 in conference and 37-9 overall, making the NCAA DIII tournament
before losing in the regional final to Chapman.
“When I began,” Coach Vaughan said,
“coming in from the football program, I wanted to bring certain qualities to
softball: emphasis on the weight room, spending more time on individual skills,
being more efficient and working harder. Then our winning led to more effort
and harder practices. We needed to bring in recruits to help elevate us, of
course, and sometimes it helps to get lucky, and we hit on some kids that
helped get us to that next level.”
I asked Coach Vaughan about his
recruiting pitch in those early years. “We were a good team in the conference,”
he replied, “and so we had something positive to say about being in a winning
program. The college was making an investment in the facilities. I tried to
convince girls that I was going to work hard and that I had high expectations,
and they had an opportunity.”
The pitch worked. In 2005 freshmen
Stephanie Rice, Jenny Marshall, Amanda Attleberger, and Meredith Brunette would
join the program and become perennial all-conference players. They were
followed in 2006 by Brittany Miller, who would go on to become an all-time
pitching great, as well as Utah State transfer Erica Hancock. The 2005 Linfield
team would repeat as conference champions before losing in the NCAA regionals;
in 2006 Linfield advanced to its first DIII Women’s College World Series.
In 2007 Linfield became a balanced
offensive machine to go along with their strong pitching. The combination
carried them to the national championship. But it wasn’t easy. Sent to
Pineville, Louisiana, for an eight-team regional (the NCAA format back then),
Linfield lost its second game to Redlands; they then had to win twice on Saturday
and Sunday. They did, including drubbing Redlands 17-1 in the final game. In the
national tourney, the team lost to Washington University in its third game and
had to come again through the loser’s bracket. They crunched University of
Wisconsin-Eau Claire 22-10 to get to the finals, where they beat Wash U in a
doubleheader. Seven players hit over .400 that year and their collective
batting average was .388. Miller was the pitching ace, but Hancock was 7-0 in
the circle and hit .433 with fourteen home runs. Among the many great players,
senior catcher Jena Loop was named the team’s MVP, as she hit .441 with 12 home
runs and 58 RBIs.
With many of their best players
returning and expectations high, 2008’s team played strongly throughout the
year, going into the West regional tournament ranked No. 4 in the country. But
2008 marked the beginning of Linfield’s great rivalry with University of Texas-Tyler, whose program under Mike Reed was
emerging as a national power. Five times in the next 11 years, Linfield would
be knocked out of the post-season tournament by UT-Tyler, including 2008 and
2009.
In 2010, Linfield entered the
post-season ranked No. 8 and sporting a 35-5 record. Perhaps to their good
fortune they were sent to the Indianola, Iowa regional at Simpson College. They
swept through undefeated and had a strong World Series, finishing runner-up to
East Texas Baptist University. 2011 would be even better.
The 2011 Linfield softball team,
which had lost only one starter, has to go down in DIII softball history as one
of the all-time greatest teams. They won the national championship, went 51-3,
and were ranked No. 1 from pre-season until the end. But even the glittering
record doesn’t reflect their dominance.
In her career for Linfield, Staci
Doucette was a four-time All-American and a three-time Northwest Conference
MVP, and she still holds the career home run record in DIII softball. As a
junior in 2011, Doucette’s hitting stat line looked like this: .532 batting
average, 21 homers, 80 RBI, and an OPS of 1.696, and this was the one year she
wasn’t MVP in the conference! Her teammate Emily Lepp, even while playing the
demanding position of catcher, put together perhaps the greatest power season
in DIII history: .497 batting average, 29 home runs (an all-time season
record), 94 RBI, and an OPS of 1.631; she threw in 21 stolen bases just to show
that she wasn’t a one-dimensional slugger.
The “Bash Sisters” — who
accomplished their feats without the aid of steroids — are 1-2 in DIII career
home runs, and 1-3 in career RBI. As if they didn’t provide enough fireworks,
Linfield also had power from Emily Keagbine and Karleigh Prestianni,
All-Americans who finished fourth and tenth nationally in home runs. The team
set an all-time DIII season record of 103 homers, which broke their own mark of
78 and may never be challenged. If you mostly follow DI softball, note that
DIII softball teams can play only forty games before the postseason, which
makes these power numbers all the more remarkable.
Still amazing
to me that 3 of the top 7 Homerun hitters and 3 of the top 4 RBI producers in
the history of NCAA Division III softball all played at Linfield. Even more
amazing is that that all three played together from 2010-12 when the Cats won
an astounding 139 of 156 games!! https://t.co/3jkZqSfDIk
— Jackson Vaughan (@CoachJVaughan) October 14, 2020
Kayla Hubrich didn’t hit for power,
but was also First-Team All-American when she hit .403, scored 70 runs, and
stole 15 bases. Linfield’s pitching in 2011 was strong. Lauren Harvey went 16-0
with an ERA of 1.70, Karina Paavola was 8-1 with a 1.46 ERA, and Claire
Velaski, the ace in the circle, went 25-2 with a 1.71 ERA to garner Third-Team
All-American honors. And then the pitchers stepped it up in the postseason.
Linfield was sent to the NCAA
Regional in Pella, Iowa, where they went 4-0, outscoring their opponents 49-0!
Two of those wins were against strong teams, as the Wildcats beat No. 7 Coe
College 10-0, and No. 5 Central College, the regional host, 12-0.
At the NCAA National Championship
Series, Linfield won its first game 10-0 but then ran into their nemesis,
UT-Tyler, losing 4-0 to drop into the losers bracket. But Linfield was never
really challenged from there, outscoring their opponents 40-5, which included a
measure of revenge in ousting UT-Tyler 7-1 in the semi-finals. The Wildcats
beat Christopher Newport 6-2 in the final to win their second national
championship in five seasons.
With numerous All-Americans
returning (including Doucette, Lepp, and Prestianni), and even more
all-conference players, Linfield looked to repeat in 2012, and most people
expected them to. But in a rather bizarre year, they went 46-7, losing six
times to one team, Pacific Lutheran University, who returned to glory for one
final year to win it all.
PLU and Linfield split their four
conference games, and PLU took two out of three in the conference tournament.
PLU was sent to UT-Tyler for their regional, while Linfield traveled to
Bloomington, Illinois, in a regional hosted by Illinois Wesleyan. Linfield
easily swept the regional, but in the national championships, PLU knocked them
into the losers bracket in the second game, and then beat them in the final
game. Linfield finished as the national runner-up.
In 2013 a strong Linfield team,
ranked #6 going into the NCAA tournament, got knocked out by UT-Tyler; in 2015
Linfield would get back into the national tourney, finishing fourth when Tufts
University won their third straight championship behind perhaps the greatest
DIII pitcher of all-time, Allyson Fournier. In following years, Linfield has
continued to be a top-ten program but has been going out of the post-season
just before the national championships — to UT-Tyler in the super-regionals in
2016 and 2018, and to eventual national champion Texas Lutheran in the 2019
super-regionals.
DIII
Anonymity
Despite the great success of
Linfield softball, the program isn’t widely known, even in the Northwest.
Amanda Reser, a senior this year, grew up in Tigard, Oregon, about forty
minutes from McMinnville. She played travel ball for the powerful Northwest
Bullets organization. “Linfield is nearby,” Reser said, “but I hadn’t really heard
about them until I got the invite to come to a camp. The focus in my travel
ball organization was DI and DII softball and getting scholarships.”
Bullets teams go to numerous
showcase tournaments and recommend that their players go to college camps.
Reser said that she didn’t like camps that much but went to them anyway, and
when she went to Linfield’s it changed her life’s direction. “Linfield’s was
the best-run camp I had attended. Not only that, but their players were willing
to help campers at each station. At other camps, the current players were often
in their own cliques, and not very helpful, but the Linfield team was very
inclusive and gave constructive feedback. I also liked the campus. I ended up
only applying to Linfield.”
Reser has a 3.99 GPA with a Finance
major and minors in Economics and Sport Management. Other softball players
across the country have similar impressive academic credentials, but Reser is
doing one thing that I’m guessing no one else is. Following her coach, in a
sense, she is a student manager for the football team.
It’s become tradition at Linfield
that a softball player is a student manager for football. Years ago the team’s
equipment manager, who is a softball fan and whose wife played, wanted someone
who had strong time management skills and understood what being at a long
practice was like. He ended up hiring a softball player, and the tradition was
born. The job is Reser’s work-study position. She is only allotted a certain
number of hours by the college, but she puts in considerably more. When I asked
jokingly if she felt exploited, she laughed. “I get paid for most of my hours,
but I also get paid in good times, and food, and getting to travel with the
football team. Mac’s wife is one of my professors, and I’ve gone to their house
for dinners, or to watch NFL football games. It’s a good job.”
Reser’s siblings went to Oregon State for the big-school experience, but
she wanted something smaller. “I like to connect to other students and to my
professors,” she said, “to know classmates when I’m walking around campus.”
Linfield’s student body has about 50% student-athletes, and Reser praises her
professors for respecting the role of athletics in students’ lives. In her
three years at Linfield, Reser hasn’t seen much game action, performing instead
the important role of being a capable reserve and a good teammate. But she says
that she wouldn’t have traded going to Linfield for anything.
Kam Apling is a fifth-year senior
and, like Reser, she hadn’t heard of Linfield when she was growing up and
attending Glencoe High School, northwest of Portland. “I spent my weekends,”
Apling said, “watching Alabama and Florida, the DI programs on TV. I didn’t
know any small schools around me. But when I found Linfield, people did mention
that the college had a good softball program, that they had won the DIII
national championship twice. I wondered why I had never heard of Linfield, but
DIII just isn’t talked about a lot.”
Apling had coaches who would see her
play and talk to her about their schools but would lose interest when Apling said
she was determined to be a nursing major in college. Many programs at DI, in
particular, discourage players from majoring in nursing, because nursing
students have practicums in a medical setting, which takes them off-campus for
long hours. But Vaughan told Apling that although it would be difficult,
nursing was doable and he was interested in her. She visited the campus, loved
the girls on the team that she met, and decided she wanted the small-campus
atmosphere. Linfield ended up being the only school that she visited.
The combination of nursing and
softball has actually gone well for Apling. “My professors have been awesome,
and classes have usually lined up with practice and game schedules. I’ve had to
stay on top of my work, and it’s been difficult at times, but overall it’s been
one of the best experiences I could have had.”
Apling graduated last May, and like
so many 2020 seniors, she had extra heartache in having the season canceled in
March. “We had been in Arizona for our spring break tournament, the NFCA
Leadoff Classic, and we had no idea that would be the last time we would play.
What would be our final game got rained out, a bit ironic given that Linfield
is in Oregon with all its rain and we were playing in Tucson. We got home and
certainly knew that COVID was happening, but we didn’t know at that time how it
would affect sports.” On the day of the season’s-ending announcement, Apling
said, she got to practice after her clinical work, to find her teammates all
crying. “The abrupt stop made it so hard,” Apling said. “We didn’t get to
celebrate our last game together or have a senior night, and we also had to
leave campus, so we were separated. The whole thing was heartbreaking.”
Apling is back for a fifth season,
in large part because in 2020-21 Linfield added a graduate program in nursing
(and changed its name from Linfield College to Linfield University). “I was
able to graduate,” Apling said, “become a nurse, and then enroll in the
graduate program. I’ll have a Master’s in Nursing at the end of August.” Her
decision to return came not only by her luck in having Linfield add the
graduate program but because a good friend, Kelsey Wilkinson, made a pact with
her. As fifth-year seniors, they would come back only if the other could also
make it work.
“I knew I wanted to keep playing,”
Apling said, and added that a big reason for that comes from the culture that
has been created and maintained. “Linfield softball is a family. Not just
players, coaches too. Being a family means you push each other to be better
each day. We practice long and hard. That is our culture. I think this is why
we are able to remain a top contender in the nation year after year.”
A
Small College With Big-Time Softball Experience
Cheyenne Fletcher came from a small
town and small high school and didn’t start playing travel ball until her
junior year. She was recruited little and late. One coach who did see her play
was Coach Vaughan, and he encouraged her to go to a skills camp at Linfield in
the winter, stay with a few players, and get a sense of what it might be to
attend the college.
Fletcher was impressed by what she
saw. “I got to watch a practice,” Fletcher recalled, “and see the players work
so hard. The practice was incredibly organized, with no one ever standing
around. It was unlike anything that I had ever experienced or seen. All the
players were buying into what was happening. I had been to other camps where
the team chemistry wasn’t the best, but I could see Linfield’s older players
mentoring and teaching the freshmen.”
If you’re going to be a consistently
excellent program, the head coach needs to be able to spot overlooked talent,
and then convince that talent to come. Vaughan saw something in Fletcher, and
she was impressed enough by him and the program to enroll. Fletcher started in
the outfield and led the 2015 team in hitting her freshman year, the Linfield
team that finished fourth at the national tourney; she was All-Northwest
Conference in each of her four years and the conference Player of the Year in
2017. She is now the assistant coach. As the saying goes, “a pretty good
get.”
Fletcher’s initial impression of
Vaughan and the Linfield program has never changed. “Jackson is the most
structured, most organized person I’ve ever been around,” she said. “He’s also
extremely creative so that no one gets bored in practices.” Productive
practices and the development of talent have been instrumental to Linfield’s
sustained excellence, but are not the only qualities.
“The
culture created here is that as a player you will learn to love and embrace the
grind, the chance to get better every day. And furthermore, everyone’s going to
have a role that will help the team. We emphasize that what happens on the
field or who starts doesn’t define a player’s self-worth.”
-
Jackson Vaughan
Fletcher majored in Exercise Science
at Linfield and also got a strength and conditioning certification. Part of her
job is to make individual strength and conditioning plans for athletes and then
oversee their efforts. But she knows something else that helps players stay
strong: team bonding. Though Fletcher played on great teams, she doesn’t most
remember the particular games, even important ones — what she remembers is the
team being together, or traveling. She remembers the relationships and the team
chemistry.
I asked Fletcher what she uses as a
recruiting pitch for Linfield, and her succinct answer echoed what I heard
inside and outside the program: “We preach that you’ll be entering a culture of
excellence, that you’re going to be treated like you’re big-time, and we’re
going to help you become the best softball player you can be.”
Staying
Great: Challenges
DIII sports have changed over the
past twenty years, in that many colleges decades ago had a participatory
model for their teams. A head coach position might be only half-time, with the
coach being given numerous other responsibilities, including a teaching load;
perhaps a team would have a part-time assistant. But no longer. Many programs
want their head softball coach to spend 90%, if not all, of their time on
softball, and some programs have multiple assistants.
Vaughan recognizes that being the
defensive coordinator in football and the head coach in softball is perhaps too
much to do. “In a way it’s a curse, doing both,” he laughs. “But then I remind
myself that it’s something no one else gets to do. I get to coach year-round,
and my favorite part of the job is practicing with my players, whether in
football or softball. That’s what’s fun, not the recruiting or the
administrating.”
Vaughan’s situation is even more
complex in that he has three young children, and he wants to spend time with
them. “I love my kids and I want to be with them. You hear the horror stories
of coach’s kids who play sports and the parent doesn’t even attend their youth
games. I don’t want that.” This devotion to family has even shaped career
ambitions.
Vaughan’s success could have led him
to taking coaching jobs at another level, but he likes the town of McMinnville,
his wife is a teacher in the school district, and he’d like to raise his
children there. Beyond the personal reasons, he also likes coaching DIII
athletes, who he says are playing sports for the right reasons, not because
they’re on scholarship and they have to.
I asked Vaughan what it’s been like
to be a national power for nearly two decades now, and he said that it’s
getting harder, in large part because so many DIII programs around the country
have gotten stronger. “I think I’m actually a better coach now than I was in
2011,” he said. “I think we’re good on the culture aspect, and that’s what I’ve
improved on the most. I want to emphasize the experience. I want my players to
have the kind of experiences that will benefit them for the rest of their lives.”
