FEATURES | HOFSTRA PULSE, SPRING 2007

The Edwards Campaign

How a former high school coach built a major program at a mid-major college

By Michael R. Sisak / Pulse

The seven-year-old score sheet hangs on the wall of Bill Edwards’ office like the conference championship and N.C.A.A. tournament banners on the fence at the nearby Hofstra Softball Stadium. The graphite marks and notations, codified into slender columns of pale blue and white, forever preserve a seminal moment in his program’s history — a 10-5 triumph over No. 1-ranked U.C.L.A. at the Paradise Classic in Honolulu on Feb. 13, 2000.

It was the first time the Pride had ever defeated a top-ranked team and the first time a team from the Northeast had ever beaten the Bruins, the winners of 10 national championships since the College World Series began in 1982. Two days prior, the Pride fell to the Bruins, which had begun the season with 11 straight wins, 6-1 in the tournament’s preliminary round.

Edwards pulled the sheet from his scorebook later in the 2000 season, when a physical education professor at Hofstra asked him for an example to show students how to keep score. It has been in the office, behind the desk, under a steel shelf, ever since.

“It’s just something I wanted to keep out for a while,” Edwards, 62, said earlier this season, his 18th at Hofstra. The former Commack physical education teacher and softball coach looks at the sheet every so often, to reminisce about the game and to remember the world-class athletes whom his girls had upset— players like Natasha Watley, Amanda Freed and Taira Mims Flowers, who helped the Bruins to the national championship in 2001 and the United States to the gold medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004.

In the years since, the Pride have embraced the spoiler role, knocking off teams of high rank and regard like Nebraska, Stanford and Arizona State. They have continued to win conference championships, even with the transition to the more competitive Colonial Athletic Association in 2002, and have played in the N.C.A.A. Tournament in every year except 2002, when the C.A.A. did not yet have an automatic bid. They are now one of the best teams in the country.

In 2003, the Pride defeated No. 17 Notre Dame and later topped No. 11 Nebraska in the opening round of the N.C.A.A. Tournament. In 2004, they beat No. 12 Auburn and forced a deciding third game against No. 7 Stanford in the N.C.A.A. Tournament in Palo Alto, Calif. In 2005 they won tournament games in Tuscaloosa, Ala. against Mississippi Valley State and Arizona State, a perennial power. Last season, the N.C.A.A. rewarded Hofstra with selection as one of its 16 regional sites, and the Pride defeated an emerging Penn State team 5-4 in an extra-inning epic that spanned two days because of thunderstorms.

In March, at the Adidas Invitational in Clearwater, Fla., the Pride defeated North Carolina State and Georgia Tech, two teams from the Atlantic Coast Conference, one of the six “power conferences” whose football teams comprise the Bowl Championship Series and whose teams accounted for 34 of the 65 in the N.C.A.A. Men’s Basketball Tournament, including all of the Final Four.

“Everyone else considers Hofstra as a mid-major university athletic program, but if you talk to any of the softball coaches around the country, we’re not a mid-major softball team,” Edwards said. “We are considered one of the country’s best programs. That’s a credit to the kids.”

The kids — like the Pride’s current stars, senior slugger Ashley Lane, the 2006 C.A.A. player of the year, and sophomore pitcher Kayleigh Lotti, a member of the C.A.A. all-conference and all-rookie team, last year — come mostly from the Northeast and mostly with rough edges.

“We don’t recruit the same student athletes that a lot of the big conferences and the B.C.S. schools recruit,” Edwards said. “They’ll go after the high-caliber player who is already at the top of her game, who is what might be considered the blue-chip athlete by every resource around the country. We don’t go after those kids. We go after the kids who we think have a tremendous amount of upside potential; who are willing to have a great work ethic; who are self-motivated and self-disciplined; and who would fit into our system here at Hofstra University. And then we coach like crazy.”

In the Hofstra system – which Edwards likened to that of the New Jersey Devils of the National Hockey League, where the personnel may change, but the success remains constant – it can take more than a year for a top high school athlete to become a top player on the college level. Edwards stewards the transition, with the aid of sixth-year associate head coach Larissa Anderson and first-year assistant coach Ryan Realmuto.

Lane chose Hofstra over Maryland, of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and St. John’s, of the Big East Conference, in part because of its proximity to her hometown of Westbury, which is four miles from the university’s Hempstead campus. She played softball for five years at W.T. Clarke High School and elicited all-state honors in each of her last three seasons. As a senior she was named the Nassau County Player of the Year, and earned selection to the all-Long Island team by Newsday and as a second-team All-American by the members of the National Fastpitch Coaches Association.

In her freshman season at Hofstra, Lane started in all but two games and batted .327 with 14 doubles, 10 home runs and 42 runs batted in, earning the C.A.A.’s equivalent of a Rookie of the Year award. Her hitting improved in each of the subsequent two seasons. As a sophomore in 2005, Lane led the Pride in hitting with a .379 batting average, 8 home runs and 31 r.b.i. Last season, she led the team in all three categories, hitting .383 with 13 homers and 63 r.b.i.

“You come here as good as you think you are, and they make you a hundred times better,” Lane said. “[Coach Edwards] makes us the best players that we can be.  He’s going to push you until you can’t get any better.”

Lotti came to Hofstra from St. Raphael’s Academy, a Catholic prep school in Pawtucket, R.I., where she allowed just one earned run in her last two seasons, won back-to-back Gatorade state player of the year honors and overcame a potentially life-threatening heart ailment.

During the summer between her junior and senior seasons at St. Raphael’s, Lotti pitched at a college showcase in Colorado and developed a crippling pain in her throwing arm. An x-ray led to the discovery of a congenital condition that was causing her aorta to narrow.  Lotti underwent surgery in Boston, about 40 miles from her hometown of South Attleboro, Mass., in Sept. 2004.

“[The Hofstra coaches] were very supportive with everything I was going through, probably the most supportive of the schools that were recruiting me,” Lotti said.

Connecticut, Seton Hall and Florida State were also interested in recruited Lotti, but she was more interested in Hofstra, supplementing the one official visit permitted under N.C.A.A. rules with her own trips to the campus. “I fell in love with the school, and I fell in love with the staff, right away.”

Laura Valentino, a senior all-county second baseman at Smithtown West High School, some 30 miles from Hempstead, has signed a letter of intent to play at Hofstra next season. Valentino has dreamed of playing for the Pride since she met Edwards at a camp when she was 12.

“I’m going to be to be coached by one of the best college softball coaches in the country,” Valentino said. Like Lotti, Valentino has been making frequent trips to Hofstra to watch games and observe practices, to become familiar with her future coaches and teammates and to expand her softball intelligence.

“I don’t think people realize the talent and the knowledge that we have on Long Island, especially at Hofstra,” Valentino said. “You can learn so much from watching one game of college softball.”

Hofstra’s current group comes from as far north as Maine and as far south as Maryland. Two – Lane and sophomore second baseman Casey Fee – are from Long Island. Four are from New Jersey and four are from Pennsylvania. Two are from outside the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic corridor: junior shortstop Pam Dreslinski is from Kingsville, Ohio and sophomore catcher Carolann Lubach, a member of last season’s C.A.A. All-Rookie team, is from Langley, Wash.

At Michigan, the Big Ten Conference school which, two years ago, became the first team from east of the Mississippi River to win the national championship, the current roster includes two players from California, one each from Florida and Nevada, and six from Michigan. At Tennessee, which began the current season ranked No. 1, there are eight players from California, two from Hawaii, and seven from Tennessee.

“Our philosophy is to take all of these Northeast kids and make it to the College World Series with them,” Edwards said. “I want to take these kids right here and I want them to get all the press and show the rest of the country that we do play good softball here.”

Hofstra had never qualified for the N.C.A.A. Tournament before Edwards was hired in 1990, after he led the softball team at Commack High School, where he worked as a physical education teacher, to the Long Island Championship. Hofstra was playing a schedule comprised largely of Division II schools and its worn out field looked more suitable for a junior high school or municipal park.

“There was no program, basically,” Edwards said. “It was in shambles.”

In just two years, Edwards led Hofstra to the first of 15 consecutive conference regular season or tournament championships. The team took three East Coast tournament titles from 1992 to 1994, the North Atlantic regular season and tournament titles in 1995, six consecutive America East banners, and five straight C.A.A. crowns. Hofstra has appeared in the N.C.A.A. tournament nine times and since 2000 it has won more tournament games than any other team from the Northeast Region.

And to think, Edwards got the job by accident.

“My buddy came into and he goes, ‘hey, Hofstra’s open and I’m interested,’” Edwards recalled. Edwards offered to call for the friend, Ken Passante, who has since coached at Braircliffe and Suffolk County Community College.

“So I call up Hofstra and I say, ‘I’m inquiring about the softball position that’s open,’ and I ask a bunch of questions and he’s over there saying, ‘ask this, ask this.’

“I thought I was talking to a secretary. I was talking to the senior women’s administration. So she says, ‘Whom am I talking to?’

Edwards told her.

“She goes, ‘Commack?’

“I go, ‘Yeah, but I’m calling for my friend.’

“She said, ‘why don’t you come in and talk?’

Edwards agreed. He made an appointment, hung up the phone and told his friend the news. “I told my buddy, ‘you’re on your own, baby! I’m going in tomorrow!’”