After coming off a legitimate run in the NCAA World Series last spring and finishing third, the Linfield softball team is hungry for a National Championship win this year.
They’ve put in the work during the offseason and have started the 2025 season off strong, leaving no doubt that they will be big-time contenders for the National Championship.
But even with all the work that must be put in both during season and out of season, sometimes rest and recovery prove to be even more crucial to a team’s success.
“Last year we played clear into June and everyone was pretty burnt out so we knew that we had to take a break,” said head coach Jackson Vaughan. “Last summer, we didn’t push the kids quite as much. They were lifting and running but we knew they probably needed a mental break from softball.”
There’s no doubt that Vaughan knows what he’s doing with the team, seeing as he’s been coaching at Linfield for 23 seasons and has a career record of 849-199-2. During those 23 seasons, Vaughan has led Linfield softball to two national titles, 11 regional championships and 17 Northwest Conference championships.
So, if Coach Vaughan orders rest, it’s for the best.
However, once the student-athletes returned back to campus in the fall, they were right back to work, with aspirations to have a season that none of the current players have had before. You can’t just wake up one day and win a Division III National Championship. The players and coaches both knew that they would have to make continuous improvements from the start of the fall through the end of the season in order to achieve the end goal.
“At the beginning of the season, our goal is to get better every day,” said senior second baseman Brynn Nelson. “We always want to have big accomplishments, winning conference, going to playoffs and winning a National Championship. Those motivate us, but I think we are extremely motivated to make ourselves and each other better every day to achieve that.”
Nelson is just one of nine seniors returning to the Linfield roster this year. With a big senior class comes a ton of experience. And experience is crucial in the world of collegiate sports.
However, in contrast to that big senior class, there are also 10 true freshmen on the roster.
Balancing so many people on each bookend can be challenging but Vaughan is making the most of it and using it as a great opportunity for the freshman to learn under the seniors.
“We’re trying to bring the freshmen into the fold but also find ways to make them better and motivate them,” said Vaughan. “It’s kind of a hard dynamic because we have so many seniors that take up most of the starting roles. So trying to find ways to motivate the freshmen with the knowledge that there isn’t much playing time available has been a challenge.”
Another challenge Vaughan has faced this year is finding a way to replace former standout pitcher and 2024 graduate Tayah Kelley.
Kelley left as Linfield’s all-time strikeout leader and set a program record with 253 single-season strikeouts in her senior year. She also had a career high 15 strikeouts against George Fox on March 29, 2024. Along with a multitude of other records, Kelley was an All-American pitcher and earned Northwest Conference Pitcher of the Year both her junior and senior year.
Needless to say, graduating Kelley left a gaping hole in the program.
Fortunately for the Wildcats and Vaughan, players have been unafraid to step up to the pitching mound and fill that void.
“Sophomore Tyler McNeely has kind of inherited Tayah’s role and she was 18-0 as a freshman as well as Northwest Conference Freshman of the Year,” said Vaughan. “Moving into the No. 1 role has definitely been a bigger challenge but she’s handled it well. She’s just lost one game which was a 2-1 result against Case Western who is ranked second in the nation right now.”
In addition to McNeely, graduate senior Tyler Warden, freshman Lacey Vasas and junior Ashlyn Aven have all also pitched and stepped up.
A huge piece to team sports is the culture that the team has within the program. And good culture starts off the field, as the hangouts, dinners and bus rides are crucial for forming bonds.
The Linfield softball team takes this seriously and credits their strong culture to much of the reason to their success.
“We all hang out together outside of softball and a lot of us live together,” said Nelson. “In the offseason, we do team bonding in large groups. We also make one-on-one team bonding with our teammates weekly in the fall so we can get to know each other individually.”
This level of bonding that the team has committed to shows on the field and in the dugout and it’s not hard to see as an outsider.
“Our dugout is pretty crazy during games,” said Vaughan. “Our girls are into it and super supportive. We just have a culture that we work really hard at and the kids buy into that. There’s a fine line between grinding too much and losing the fun for it.”
One thing that can help any team with bonding is taking an out of state trip at some point during the season. Obviously, it helps with facing new competition that can push teams and make them better. But there is so much time spent in the airport, buses, restaurants and hotel rooms that proves to be incredibly important for teammates to get to know each other better.
At the very beginning of the 2025 season, the softball team decided to take advantage of all the opportunities that traveling out of state can provide by heading down south to Georgia.
“Taking the trip to Georgia helped a lot because you go on the road and you’re able to spend time away from just playing the game,” said Vaughan. “We usually try to switch up roommates a lot so they can get to know their teammates better.”
Outside of the business aspect of traveling – you obviously still need to go and win games, which the team had no problem doing in Georgia – the players get to just enjoy each other and time away from everyday campus life.
“I always love traveling with the team,” said Nelson. “When we travel, we get to have team dinners every night and we have played card games in the lobby of hotels, watched movies together and more.”
The team culture that the players and coaches of the Linfield softball team have created and fully bought in to has no doubt contributed to their long-standing success throughout the years. And this 2025 season is proving to be following along similar paths of dominance.
Though the Wildcats are off to a fantastic start, they remember to take one game at a time and stay humble.
“The conference is pretty good in softball,” said Vaughan. “So I think we’ll get challenged, particularly by Lewis and Clark and Pacific Lutheran. It’s hard in our conference because you play everyone four times and to beat someone four times in a row is pretty tough.”
But one thing we know about Linfield softball is that they are willing to take challenges head on and without fear. They’ve put in the work day-in and day-out and so when they step on the field on game day, the preparation and culture does all the talking for them.
