John U. Bacon

This spring, the University of Michigan women’s softball team won its 15th Big Ten title, and fifth in a row. It went to the NCAA tournament – for the 18th straight season – and won its 14th NCAA regional crown, before losing on Friday in the super-regional to third-ranked Alabama.

In other words, just another typical season for Michigan softball – a team led by Carol Hutchins, one of Michigan’s best coaches, of any sport, in any era. Winning titles is what they do.

And this was not even one of Hutchins’ best teams.

That’s how well this machine runs – and make no mistake, it is a machine. Hutchins’ teams have won more Big Ten titles than the rest of the conference – combined. But it’s a machine she put together, part by part, one that took years of tinkering just to win her first race.

That Hutchins even got the chance was a bit of a miracle in itself. She grew up in Lansing, the fifth of six kids. Her own mom didn’t see the point in her playing sports, let alone competing. But Hutchins refused to quit.

She attended Lansing Everett High School, where she shared the court with a young man named Earvin Johnson – better known as Magic. Right off, the differences between men’s and women’s sports were glaring. Magic’s team got nice home and away uniforms and practiced after school. Hutchins’ team wore reversible “pinnies,” and practiced late at night.

When both Magic and Hutchins enrolled at Michigan State, the contrast was even greater. The men’s basketball team traveled by private plane, and stayed two to a room in nice hotels. The women drove rented vans, and slept four to a room, at the cheapest places they could find.

But none of this dampened Hutchins’ love for sports. She ultimately switched from basketball to softball, and from the Spartans to the Wolverines. When she interviewed at Michigan for a position split between assistant softball coach and administrative assistant, former athletic director Don Canham asked her one question: Could she type?

Hutchins thought about it for a moment. Then she said, with complete conviction, “Yes. Yes I can.” Except, of course, she couldn’t – but if she had told the truth, Michigan would have lost out on its winningest coach.

Fresh off her master’s degree, Hutchins received a whopping three thousand dollars her first year – which had her mom shaking her head all over again. Two years later, Hutchins became Michigan’s head coach. In her eighth season, her team won its first Big Ten title – and since then, they’ve been winning them almost every year.

Finally, in 2005, her team became the first softball squad east of Oklahoma and north of Cal-Berkeley to win an NCAA title – about as stunning as a hockey team from Alabama taking the national crown.

How does she do it? First, her players love her, and so do her assistants. The seniors cry at their banquet, realizing a great phase of their lives has just ended. The assistants never leave, despite getting many good offers to go elsewhere. And when you’re on her team, you get to see her goofy side – “and no one else gets to see that,” recent graduate Kristin Larsen says.

During a road trip, Larsen managed to get Hutch and the team hooked on “The Office.” When they got back to Michigan, they set up a camera in the clubhouse for “confessionals,” and the players would actually tape these during games – including a 10-run inning to cap a come-from-behind victory during the 2008 NCAA regionals. A few days later, Hutch herself showed up for practice dressed as Dwight – and the players howled.

When you get to third base, Hutch – as even her players call her – gives you peanut M&Ms out of her back pocket. Hit a homer, and she tosses a few in the air for you to catch as you round third.

But Hutch is not always warm and fuzzy. Former athletic director Bill Martin said, “If every coach at Michigan was stamped out of the same mold as Hutch, you wouldn’t need an athletic director. Her kids thrive in the classroom, and she’s a great colleague and mentor to other coaches. She was an absolute pleasure to work with – except after a loss.”

For 10 years, Martin’s office was right next to hers. He quickly learned that, on a Monday after her team lost even one of the four games that weekend, “don’t come in. She is a big grump!”

Well, as Woody Hayes often said: Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a busboy. Hutch’s mom should be glad to know: her daughter is no busboy.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

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John U. Bacon

I went to Ann Arbor Huron High School, considered by every objective source to be the greatest high school in the history of the universe. And one of the things that made it so great when I was there was an intramural softball league.

Maybe your clearly inferior high school had one, too. But the IM softball league at Huron was created and run entirely by students – the burnouts, no less. That meant the adults, perhaps wisely, wanted nothing to do with it.

So the burnouts got the park permits – God bless ‘em – and every clique had a team, from the guys in auto shop to marching band. They gave their teams names like the Extra Burly Studs, the Master Batters and – yes – the ‘Nads. If you pause to think of their cheer, you’ll get the joke.

My buddies and I failed to get a team together our junior year, but our senior year, we found inspiration. Most of my friends weren’t playing spring sports, so we came home every day after school to catch “Leave It To Beaver” re-runs on Channel 20 – on something called UHF. (Kids, go ask Grandpa.)

Come softball season, we were moved to build a team around that very name: The Cleavers. But if we were going to face battle-tested squads like the All-Star Rogues and the Ghetto Tigers, we knew we’d need an edgier name. And that’s when we came up with – yes – the Almighty Cleavers. You know, to instill fear in our opponents.

You can imagine how well that worked.

Our next stroke of genius was our uniform: we each got one of our dads’ undershirts, then used a laundry marker to write one of the characters’ names on the back: Ward, Wally, Eddie – we had ‘em all. Now all we needed were 10 more players.

No problem. Once word got out about our hardcore name and unis, people flocked to our team, even a half-dozen women. None of the other teams were co-ed, but there was no rule against it – because there were almost no rules. That’s what you get when you play in a league founded by burnouts.

We didn’t just expect to lose. We were built to lose. But we didn’t care. In fact, that was our team motto: “We Don’t Care.” Whenever somebody was seen running too hard or – god forbid – sliding into home plate, we started our chant: “We Don’t Care! We Don’t Care!”

The girls could play wherever they wanted, and nobody was allowed to yell at anyone, no matter how badly they screwed up.

It probably helped that, like most teams, we brought cooling beverages to each game, be they “jumbos” of Goebel’s, “torpedoes” of Colt 45 or, for big games, an actual quarter barrel of Stroh’s Bohemian Style. We’d set it up right at the corner of Huron Parkway and Fuller, with Lord knows how many teachers, parents and police officers driving by. No one cared.

Yes, I know we were being stupid and illegal, but you have to remember this was at a time when Huron had a smoking lounge for students, Ann Arbor had a five-dollar pot law, and the Almighty Cleavers were probably on the conservative side of things. Okay, on a very relative scale. And all of it might explain why I can’t recall a single fight among the 12 tribes that played. (Take that any way you want.)

But what I saw next defied explanation: Against a bunch of guys who clearly wanted to beat us, our co-ed squad won the game. And then, another. And another.

It was incredible. Once the girls realized they weren’t going to get yelled at, their Inner Softball Players came out – and before we knew it, we finished the regular season at 9-2, in second place.

Well, our magical season had to come to an end, and it did – with a playoff loss to the always-tough Junior Junkies. Even more heartbreaking, actor Hugh Beaumont, who played Ward Cleaver, died the week before, prompting all of us to draw black armbands on our sacred jerseys.

But then, something even stranger happened. The mother of one of our founders happened to be the president of the American Psychiatric Association, so reporters were always calling her up to get her expert opinion on this or that. When an Associated Press reporter asked her about violence on television, she finally said, “Well, it can’t be that bad. My son watches ‘Leave It to Beaver’ every day with his buddies.’”

It just so happened the reporter was a big “Leave It to Beaver” fan, and voila! All of a sudden our team was on the AP wire, in the Detroit News, the Detroit Free Press and featured in TV Guide, for crying out loud.

My grandparents, in from Eastern Canada, must have been completely confused – or simply assumed all American teenagers appear in national stories for playing IM softball as a rite of passage before graduating. But the unexpected attention wasn’t the point.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had more fun playing anything than I did playing intramural softball that spring. No parents, no umpires, no rules except most runs win – and win or lose, get over it. “No One Cares!”

It was low-rent, small stakes, and big, big fun – because it was ours.

I don’t think kids today have any idea what that feels like.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the Wall Street Journal, and ESPN Magazine, among others. He is the author of “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller, and “Third and Long: Three Years with Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines,” due out this fall through FSG. Bacon teaches at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009.

Julia Friedman, a member of the Sharks team coached by her sister Rebecca, scores a run. (Photo by Louise Chang.)

We were in the field and there was a runner on second. I yelled a reminder from the dugout that we could only get an out at first base. The batter hit a soft grounder right to my shortstop, who fielded it cleanly and made a perfect toss to the third baseman.

The two girls looked quite pleased with themselves. It would have been a textbook play – that is, if anyone had been running to third base. Despite our extensive discussions in practice of what makes a force play, some of the girls still seemed completely confused. I felt that no matter how much I tried, I was doing something wrong as the coach. I felt like I was in over my head and worried that I wouldn’t be able to help the girls. I began to wonder if I had made a mistake taking on a team as head coach.

My dad had been my sister’s Ann Arbor Rec & Ed softball coach since first grade and all I had asked was if I could help out occasionally. He instead offered me the head coach position and a group of 16 nine-year-old girls. Having absolutely no coaching experience, I thought the job sounded like fun and relatively little work. I accepted eagerly.

When it came time to start preparing for my first practice, I began to realize that it might not be as easy as I had anticipated.

Coach Rebecca Friedman with Katrina Sadis. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

It was five minutes to 7 p.m. and I was standing at Winchell Park going over again and again in my head the drills and stations I had planned for the Sharks’ first practice. How am I supposed to keep 16 fourth-grade girls focused for an hour and a half? What if they don’t like me? What if they ask questions I can’t answer? I knew my concerns were typical for a first-time coach, but this made me no less uneasy. I worked hard to appear as collected as possible for that first hour and a half and, to my surprise, got through it without any major train wrecks.

The girls seemed enthusiastic for the most part and generally listened without my having to grovel. I had learned my first lesson: If I acted as though I knew I was in charge, the girls would listen, but I needed to add a little more conviction to my normally soft voice. I felt guilty at first using anything other than a soothing tone, but I quickly learned they could handle something a little harsher. This proved to be at least somewhat effective, especially with the small blonde girl who seemed determined to convince me she could throw just as well sitting down as she could standing.

Coach Rebecca Friedman leads the Sharks in a stretching exercise. (Photo by Louise Chang.)

At 8:30 the girls packed up and headed towards their waiting parents. “Thanks, Coach!” a few of them called out. I guess that’s when it hit me that it was my team. I felt an immediate attachment to each of the girls.

As our first game approached, I encountered the wonderful behind-the-scenes coach’s responsibilities. First, I had to e-mail all the parents and let them know when and where to be for each game. I seemed to be constantly using that e-mail list throughout the season.

Making the lineup turned out to be much more time-consuming than I had anticipated. I had to balance the innings the girls were in the infield, outfield, or on the bench; I couldn’t have a girl “cheer” two innings in a row; and I couldn’t have anyone sit twice before another player sat once.

The Sharks weren't happy with their bland white T-shirts – they later decided to tie-dye them red and blue. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

I also had to accept that while putting the best players at the busier positions might win more games, it wasn’t exactly in the Rec & Ed spirit. When the jerseys arrived, I had to distribute them, doing the best I could to give each girl the size she ordered and a number she happy with. The girls weren’t too happy with the boring white jerseys we were assigned, so we decided to tie-dye them, making us the coolest looking team in the league.

When it was finally game time, the nerves that had subsided after that first practice returned. I saw flashes of my team being demolished every game, with angry girls and parents blaming me. It turned out I didn’t have to worry. The girls played far beyond my expectations, fielding balls I was sure would roll between their legs and catching throws I thought would fly beyond them.

I coached first base when my team was at bat, and gave each girl a high five when she got a hit. I loved their look of excitement when they realized they had done something well. We won that game 30-24. Yes, this is a softball score. Although I hadn’t done anything on the field, I felt a huge sense of accomplishment, with a lot of relief as well.

My nerves were gone after that and I enjoyed practically every minute of coaching. After the team won the next two games, I was feeling good about our undefeated record. It didn’t last. With half the team missing, we lost the next game. I took it harder than the girls. We won the next two but then set into a rough patch, losing three games in a row.

Katrina Sadis gets ready to run as Rebecca Friedman coaches from beside first base. (Photo by Louise Chang.)

I went into the last game as nervous as I had been for the first. We were playing the Cardinals, an intensely coached team that had lost only one game all season and had wiped us out the previous week. My girls were completely oblivious to the fact that, with five wins and four losses, our winning record was at stake. I tried to convince myself it really wasn’t all that important. But … I really wanted the win.

I tried to keep low expectations and just hoped that some of the lessons I had been drilling into the girls’ heads all season would stick. Maybe they would actually run through first base without staring at the balls they had just hit, or would catch the ball with their glove facing up instead of flopping it around upside down.

The game was close and nerve-wracking throughout. My girls were hitting well, executing plays we had gone over in practice, and, for the most part, throwing to bases where runners were actually headed. But the other team was doing the same. We went into the last inning tied. My girls scored four runs. However, at that age, four runs can disappear before you know it.

Their first batter hit a pop fly right to my second baseman. She held out her glove and the ball fell right in – and to my surprise, stayed there. One down, two to go. One batter got on base but we got two quick force outs to close them out. We had won. The girls started jumping and screaming with excitement. I had to force myself to act mature and not join in.

Isabella Binkley, left, claps after Samantha Restorick doused the coach with water at an end-of-the-season celebration at Dairy Queen. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

After the game I handed out participation trophies to each girl. Even though they still would have received them if we had lost each game, I loved how excited they got when they saw the box of shiny plastic statues.

After making the girls sit through an end-of-the-year speech, I decided to celebrate at Dairy Queen. Eating our ice cream, having staring contests, laughing together, and even having a cup of ice cold water poured over my head on DQ’s back benches is one of my favorite memories of the season.

It was the last time I would be surrounded by a sea of blue and red tie-dyed Sharks. I was sad that the season was at its end. I wanted a few more games to see how much more the girls could improve, and how much more I could show them. I made sure to give each girl a hug as she gave me her last high-pitched, “Thanks, Coach!”

A team photo of the Sharks. (Photo by Wendy Binkley.)

About the writer: Rebecca Friedman, an intern with The Ann Arbor Chronicle, will be a senior this fall at Huron High School.