After taking her Tigers to the Division III World Series last year, Erica Hanrahan returns ready to do it all again. Despite going 1-6 to begin the young softball season, Hanrahan has seen plenty of potential and progress from her Tigers. This week, The DePauw sat down with the coach to discuss her thoughts on the 2016 season.
The DePauw (TDP): Having come off of last year’s success, how did you prepare your team mentally for this season? Obviously there’s a little bit of pressure.
Erica Hanrahan (EH): Well, we’ve taken the pressure off by going 1-6 to start the season. But in all honesty, when you lose three key players who played almost every inning of every game… and add seven new freshmen, you recognize and you talk about with your team that last year was a wonderful experience…. But this is a new journey and a new year…We try to give them that kind of talk where it’s a process, where we want to be the best at the end, not in the beginning… Now that [the season has] started and we didn’t quite have what we wanted, I think people are hungry to now prove that they are better. The jitters are gone, the freshmen got their first chances and the new people in new positions have kind of started to gel.
TDP: You guys have played Birmingham Southern, Berry, Averett and Emory to start the season. You don’t usually face these teams, correct?
EH: Emory we have faced before, but you’re right, the [others]…are new teams.
TDP: Did you just add them to face new competition?
EH: [It’s] strength of schedule. All four of those teams were ranked in the top 25 at some point, if not the entire season, last year. So I figured, you only get better by playing the best. One of the things that I was aware of was that some of these teams may have a month on us because they start practice in early January, and yes they’ve gone outside, but all those things in my mind are excuses you make to justify if you don’t play well enough… We always want to play teams when they’re at their best so we learn what level we need to get to.
TDP: You always make sure to put them at the beginning of the season?
EH: I do them all over, but I don’t want it to ever be an easy schedule going into Conference, because then it’s easier to drop some of those early conference games.
TDP: You mentioned how you had three critical seniors last year, and now this season you have six. How much emphasis do you put on senior leadership, or do you think whoever is willing to step up can be a leader?
EH: We actually have some diversity in leadership this year that come throughout all of the classes. I would say that every senior class really shapes the culture and the attitude of the team… Last year, we had a very intense, driven group of seniors who… really kind of ruled the class that way. The year before we had two really earthy, spiritual, kind [and] meditative seniors… Again, we won the conference tournament that year, but there were two whole different feels to the team.
TDP: What do you think personally was the key to last season’s success?
EH: Selflessness. I think every kid on the team wanted the team to win more than their own role to be the starter or star player. I think when we went to the World Series, and there were eight teams there, and everybody had multiple All-Americans on their teams and we didn’t have one, it showed that we got there because a different hero stepped up in every game… There are a lot of jokes with the umpires I face because I make a lot of changes during games because people play certain roles: base runners then go in to play the outfield or pinch hitters then go in to play first base… You can have 16 [or] 17 kids in a double header, whereas a lot of teams stick with nine or ten.
TDP: You had previously said how selflessness is one of your three core values. What are the other two?
EH: Dedication and relentlessness. I think last year, we had this fight in us, and throughout the playoffs, we got down in almost every one of our games. We were trailing, and we came back to win those games. Some were 3-0 deficits and some were 7-0 deficits, and we came back. And so the relentlessness comes with not just resiliency, but resiliency with this extra fight in it… Dedication is something that is, believe or not, easiest for us because the kids work out year round and really give into the weight lifting and condition program.