1996 Softball Champs Set The Tone For JSU In Division I
5/2/2020 9:24:00 AM | Softball
When Jacksonville State took the leap into Division I 25 years ago, no one knew how long it would take to make a splash on the NCAA's highest level. The Gamecock softball program made sure it didn't have to wait long.
The 1996 team claimed the Trans America Athletic Conference (TAAC) title in its first year in the league, the school's first in any sport at the Div. I level, and advanced to the Seattle Regional to face No. 1 Washington. That laid the foundation for Gamecock Softball and for the entire athletics department.
When looking at a program that has now won 11 regular season championships, eight conference tournament titles and made appearances in the NCAA's Division I Championship, Jana McGinnis credits that 1996 squad with setting the table for all of that success.
"When you're building anything, you have to have cornerstones," McGinnis said. "And they are the cornerstone of our program. They're the ones that enabled us to keep adding and keep getting stronger and keep getting better and build. They laid the foundation."
McGinnis has been the leader in all of that success. Just wrapping up her 27th season as the program's head coach, she was a third-year coach in 1996 and heard the talk about how long it would take for JSU to have any success in Division I. Luckily, she and the team she put together for that maiden voyage into the game's highest level didn't buy into the doubt. That is something that she says has carried her program to this day.
"They made us realize that the softball program could win and could win early," McGinnis added. "And they also made it attractive for recruits very quickly. We became the school that a lot of people in the state wanted to come to. After that, it seemed like softball exploded in this area."
Finding A Battery
When McGinnis was named the head coach in 1994, she was taking over a program that was moving up in two years. She remembered the words of then-Athletics Director Jerry Cole when he hired McGinnis to lead his softball team and her twin sister Dana to coach the women's basketball team.
"When Mr. Cole hired us, his words to us were, 'Y'all are young, dumb and can endure the hard part about moving to Division I," she said. "He honestly didn't think we would win a conference championship. He thought it would be at least eight to ten years before Jax State tasted any success."
Cole was confident in McGinnis but didn't pressure her to find the best players out there. He encouraged her to "recruit good people." That's what she did and continues to do at this stage in a career that has seen over 900 wins and seven conference Coach of the Year honors – her first coming from the Trans America Athletic Conference in the 1996 season.
"Honestly, Mr. Cole just told me to recruit good people, and that kind of took the pressure off of me," she said.
After her first season saw a 16-22 record, she had two years before the Division I debut. The game of fast pitch was new to McGinnis, but she knew enough to know where to start.
She turned to Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kan., where the pitcher-catcher duo of Ann Shelton and Wendy McKibbin were leading one of the top junior college programs in the nation.
"Ann and Wendy were my first two," she said. "I'd studied the game enough and talked to enough coaches to know that you'd better have good pitcher and a good catcher. I'd never heard of Johnson County, but their coach (Ron Meinert) was a hall of famer and I knew they had some of the best players in the nation, so I trusted him. The things he told me about them were enough for me to know I wanted them to be a part of our program."
It wasn't the playing ability of the battery that garnered McGinnis' attention, though. It was a mailout from the school that found its way to her office and tempted her to read through it one night where she was working late.
"I was sitting at the office one night and had received this nice media guide from Johnson County Community College," she remembered. "I sat there and read every bio and marked three players in there I was interested in based on their bloodline and their history. Ann and Wendy were two of those three."
McGinnis started talking with Meinert and then with Shelton and McKibbin. She convinced the two to take a visit to campus, and Shelton's dad drove them to Jacksonville. The two would sign and then McGinnis would see them play for the first time in the 1995 NJCAA National Tournament in Hutchinson, Kan. Both made the All-Tournament Team.
"I saw them play for the first time after we signed them," McGinnis said. "We watched them play in the national tournament, and it was the first time I'd seen them in a uniform. I sat down and Wendy hit a home run, and I got excited and asked, 'Is that the player we're getting?"
For Shelton, now Ann Welsh, and McKibbin, they were sold on JSU. Once they came to campus and were face-to-face with McGinnis and the JSU campus, Welsh explains that she knew it was the place for her.
"I came from a junior college and was coming a long way to play for somebody that I'd just talked to and met only once," Welsh remembered. "But once I did that and was face-to-face and saw the school, it was one of those things where you realize 'This is where I'm supposed to be.' I wasn't worried about not being a part of a conference until my senior year."
Building The Roster
With her battery on board, McGinnis turned to local talent that was used to playing the slow pitch game to build the rest of her roster. That added to the challenge of getting ready for the move to Division I, using a roster of players that still had to learn the game they'd be playing.
"Ann and Wendy were the only two players on that 1995 team that had fast pitch experience," McGinnis said. "I just tried to get the cream of the crop from this area that were good athletes, that were gritty and that could make the adjustment to fast pitch."
One of those players was Rachel Stone, a Cherokee County High School alum that was currently playing slow pitch at Gadsden State.
"I knew Rachel because I'd watched her in this area and knew she was one of the best around, so I had in my mind that when she became a sophomore at Gadsden State I was going to go after her," McGinnis recalled.
Stone joined Shelton and McKibbin, knowing their first year would be a transition year that wouldn't allow for any postseason play and a combination of a Division II and Division I schedule. They just wanted to play.
Welsh recalled finding out that none of her new teammates or coaches had fast pitch experience, something she said "shocked" her at first but wasn't an issue once she met her team for the first time.
"At first when I found out none of the other players had ever played fast pitch I honestly couldn't believe it," she said. "But I never had another thought about it after that. Once we got out there together and all got to know each other, we all just jelled and played ball. Once I was around them and had a feel for how everybody was, I never thought twice about it."
It didn't matter to the newcomers that they didn't have a postseason, nor did it matter that their young head coach was still learning the game she was coaching. They all shared the same goals. They wanted to play and they wanted to please McGinnis.
"I've never been around a group of people that loved the game more, from the top of the lineup to the people that sat on the bench," Welsh said. "We all supported each other, and we worked as hard as we could at practice because we knew we had another ballgame coming up. I think it was just the love of the game. And I didn't want to disappoint Coach McGinnis. She had a way of making you dig deep and pull something out that may not have thought you had."
Stone, now Rachel Smith, gave almost the same response as Welsh when asked about McGinnis and her team.
"I just wanted to make Coach happy," Smith said. "In the fall, I wanted to run my mile as fast as I could run my mile. From the beginning of the training until the very end."
The 1995 transition season saw JSU post a 32-16 record and win games over the top three teams in the Division II rankings during the year. Despite having no postseason to play for, they enjoyed each game and took them one at a time.
"I didn't study teams then like I do now," Smith said. "I didn't know if the team we were playing was ranked. They may have told us after a game, but we didn't focus on that pregame. We just tried to go out there and beat who was in front of us. That was our mentality. Coach always has high expectations for every team that she puts out there. We didn't really know any better. We just tried to beat everybody that we played."
Home, Sweet Home
By the time 1996 rolled around, the team that had had to drive to Anniston to play at the Woodland Park complex and practice on the intramural fields on campus had a stadium. The baseball team had moved down the road to Rudy Abbott Field, allowing University Field to be renovated to host softball, completing Cole's goal for the program to have a home field when they started Division I play.
The Gamecocks debuted it with a 9-0, 8-0 sweep of Tennessee State on Feb. 15.
"For me it was really neat," Smith remembered. "I'd never had a home field at any point in my high school or college career. Every team I was on had always had to share a field with someone else, so coming to Jacksonville and being able to have a home field was really special for me."
Welsh had a field at Johnson County, but she described it as "a field with no dugouts and just benches on either side."
"When we moved into University Field, we didn't just get a home field, it was a stadium," she said. "There were bleachers and places for people to sit. It was special."
Even though the Gamecocks were eligible, the players don't remember focusing on the postseason. They didn't talk about how far they could go. They just talked about beating the team that was next on their schedule.
"I don't know that I even knew they had regionals when the season started," Smith said. "I don't think I knew how the playoffs worked. I'm sure coach did, but she never mentioned that to us until we got to the end. The expectation was to take it one game at a time and beat whoever was in front of us."
We Belong
The Gamecocks won their first 10 games of 1996 and were 29-4 on April 1. A team that had just wanted to play softball for the past two seasons was starting to realize that they belonged.
"At some point you do realize that," Welsh recalled. "Because we were playing in our conference and we were like, 'Hey, we're beating all of the people, so there is a chance that we can be on top."
On top is where they found themselves at the end of the regular season, with a 13-3 record in TAAC play and the top spot in the league's West Division. Shelton was named the TAAC Player of the Year and was joined on the First-Team All-TAAC by McKibbin, Stone and Jennifer Russo. McGinnis was named the TAAC Coach of the Year.
"That was our first year in the league, and I remember going into the banquet and everyone was like, 'Who is this team?," McGinnis said. "There were a lot of those teams that had been in it for a while and dominated that league. We took a lot of awards away at that banquet, and I remember leaving and telling our girls that they were looking down on us and I think that motivated them throughout tournament."
The Gamecocks won their first three games of the conference tournament in Buies Creek, N.C., to reach the title game unbeaten. A costly error forced an if-game with East Division Champion Campbell, forcing winner-take-all if game with the host Camels.
JSU won that game in extra innings, when Smith dropped a two-out hit just over the Campbell third baseman, sending the Gamecocks to NCAA play in the first season they were eligible.
"We were leading in the championship game a lost on an overthrow into the dugout, but then we came back and Rachel got the flare over third base that won the tournament for us," McGinnis recalled. "It just flared and hit the ground. It's still in slow motion to me."
McGinnis joked about a conversation she had with Smith not long before that moment. The senior was upset with herself about not hitting the ball hard, and her coach talked to her about how that didn't matter. Welsh recalled the hit, one she still talks about to this day with the players that she coaches.
"I still talk about Rachel's hit," Welsh said. "It's a good motivator for high school girls, because it doesn't matter what it looks like, and in the book, it doesn't show you what it looks like. As long as you hit it, it hits the ground and scores that run, it's a hit."
Smith remembers that tournament title being the defining moment in a great season for the 1996 team.
"I think we'd gotten some folks' attention throughout the season with our record, but I felt like winning the conference championship kind of sealed the deal for us," she said. "I remember coming back into Jacksonville and getting a police escort. There were people sitting out there waiting for us when we got back to congratulate us. I remember Coach (Jim) Skidmore and Coach (Bill) Burgess being there and them being happy that we'd pulled that off. I think after we won that conference tournament, people started to really say that we were for real."
The team that had no postseason to play for the year before and had no one expecting them to compete in Division I for years had done it immediately. It had won a conference title in its first season of competition. The only shot for those seniors that transferred from junior college wasn't over.
"After we won the conference tournament, we were just excited that there was more softball to play," Smith recalled. "Once we got the opportunity to get the play-in, we were just hungry. We wanted to find out how far we could go."
The First Dance
The NCAA Tournament wasn't what we know today. The Gamecocks had to travel to UNC Greensboro for a best-of-three play-in series that decided who made it to the NCAA Tournament.
They swept UNCG, 9-2 and 6-0, and the NCAA paired them with No. 1 Washington in the Seattle Regional. The program in its first year of Division I from Jacksonville State was on the game's grandest stage against the nation's top ranked team, a big step for a bunch that McGinnis described as a simple team.
"The thing I remember the girls being most excited about wasn't that we were going to play the No. 1 team in the nation," the coach recalled. "They we excited that we got to fly! That's what everyone was excited about. Talk about keeping it simple."
But the Gamecocks weren't in a simple regional. The first-year Division I program from Jacksonville was suddenly paired with teams from the Pac 10, Big 12 and Big Ten in their first taste of NCAA postseason play. Longtime broadcaster Mike Parris was shipped out west with the team to broadcast his first ever attempt at a softball game and had to do so on the game's largest stage.
"I'd never done a softball game before, so I was scared to death," Parris recalled. "We were going to play the No. 1 team in the nation and the No. 1 national seed in Seattle. I knew nothing. I didn't know a rise ball from a fast ball. But it was cool to me that we were in our first year in Division I and we were in a regional with the No. 1 national seed in Washington, Oklahoma State, who had a pretty good softball tradition, and Indiana."
They flew across the country to open against the Huskies, a team from the dominant league in the nation – the Pac 10 – with players they'd heard so many stories about. But they did so without intimidation, thanks in large part to their ace in the circle that had them ready for the challenge.
"Ann wouldn't admit it, but she really did give that team a boost of confidence when they went on the field," McGinnis said. "They knew that we had something special in Ann when she took the mound, but I think to this day they appreciate that even more."
For the first time all season, the Gamecocks knew something about their opponent. They took the eventual national runners-up to the wire, falling 2-0 in their NCAA Tournament debut. They would then fall to Indiana to end that magical run but not before proving themselves on the national stage.
"That was the first scouting report we did all season," McGinnis said. "We didn't know anything about anyone we played to that point, but we knew a little about Washington. They had the best pitcher in the nation and it was neat to see that, but Ann stood toe-to-toe with her."
Welsh remembers that moment more now than she says she did then. As almost 25 years have passed, she's learned to appreciate it even more as time goes by.
"It was a tremendous feeling," she said. "I do remember being out there and being very jittery warming up and to start with. The stadium was very different than anything we'd ever played in. They had a pep band that played and it was above our dugout. I remember thinking 'I wish that band would quit playing so I could concentrate.' Now that I look back, it probably is more amazing than what I realized as a player then."
Expectations Live On
The game has changed a great deal since that appearance in 1996, but thanks to the success of that first Division I team at JSU, the goal of each team since has been the same. McGinnis has taken eight more teams to the NCAA Regionals since that first trip, all in the past 13 years. One thing she's carried from that first trip is to slow down and enjoy it.
"One thing I regret about that regional is that we didn't know then to slow everything down and take it all in," she said. "I tell every team that you haven't experienced Division I softball until you get to play in a regional. I want that to be their goal every year."
With all of the success that has followed the 1996 team, McGinnis says all of that has been set up by that special first season. She talks about 1996 with every team, and even though it took 12 years to get back to the NCAA Regionals afterwards, it was that run that set the table for all of the trips that came after.
"I can honestly say that '96 team has extended my career," she said. "I can remember that first team that won it again, one of our players said 'Coach, do we have to hear about the 1996 team anymore?' I don't know if I could've stuck with it 10 years of never getting to win a championship or building or program up, but they let us taste success quickly and people wanted to be a part of it."
As for the players on that first championship team, they have a great sense of pride for what they started at Jacksonville State and the foundation they helped lay. They are also quick to point the finger at McGinnis for the constant in the entire run.
"Somebody had to start and lay the foundation," Smith said. "For me to look at the program now and where it is today, it lets me know how coach pushes people year-in and year-out. She doesn't settle for the previous years' successes. She wants every team to be better than the last team, and you can see that. Jacksonville State has been blessed to have her in one spot for that long, and you can see how every team has been better, the program has been better and the level of play has been better."
"The requirements that Coach McGinnis puts on athletes are very important and that has continued on from the very beginning," Welsh said. "She always talks about how this is home and we are a family, and that is so very true. I was on one of her first teams but I can meet athletes that she coaches now on the street and we have a connection and we are a family. It's amazing that she's gotten that out of so many people over so many years, and that's part of that success.
"Somebody had to start it, and I am so very proud that I was a part of that. And that makes me feel like I am a part of every group, just knowing I was there when it started. I'm proud of every team that she's coached and the successes that they have."
The 1996 team claimed the Trans America Athletic Conference (TAAC) title in its first year in the league, the school's first in any sport at the Div. I level, and advanced to the Seattle Regional to face No. 1 Washington. That laid the foundation for Gamecock Softball and for the entire athletics department.
When looking at a program that has now won 11 regular season championships, eight conference tournament titles and made appearances in the NCAA's Division I Championship, Jana McGinnis credits that 1996 squad with setting the table for all of that success.
"When you're building anything, you have to have cornerstones," McGinnis said. "And they are the cornerstone of our program. They're the ones that enabled us to keep adding and keep getting stronger and keep getting better and build. They laid the foundation."
McGinnis has been the leader in all of that success. Just wrapping up her 27th season as the program's head coach, she was a third-year coach in 1996 and heard the talk about how long it would take for JSU to have any success in Division I. Luckily, she and the team she put together for that maiden voyage into the game's highest level didn't buy into the doubt. That is something that she says has carried her program to this day.
"They made us realize that the softball program could win and could win early," McGinnis added. "And they also made it attractive for recruits very quickly. We became the school that a lot of people in the state wanted to come to. After that, it seemed like softball exploded in this area."
Finding A Battery
When McGinnis was named the head coach in 1994, she was taking over a program that was moving up in two years. She remembered the words of then-Athletics Director Jerry Cole when he hired McGinnis to lead his softball team and her twin sister Dana to coach the women's basketball team.
"When Mr. Cole hired us, his words to us were, 'Y'all are young, dumb and can endure the hard part about moving to Division I," she said. "He honestly didn't think we would win a conference championship. He thought it would be at least eight to ten years before Jax State tasted any success."
Cole was confident in McGinnis but didn't pressure her to find the best players out there. He encouraged her to "recruit good people." That's what she did and continues to do at this stage in a career that has seen over 900 wins and seven conference Coach of the Year honors – her first coming from the Trans America Athletic Conference in the 1996 season.
"Honestly, Mr. Cole just told me to recruit good people, and that kind of took the pressure off of me," she said.
After her first season saw a 16-22 record, she had two years before the Division I debut. The game of fast pitch was new to McGinnis, but she knew enough to know where to start.
She turned to Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kan., where the pitcher-catcher duo of Ann Shelton and Wendy McKibbin were leading one of the top junior college programs in the nation.
"Ann and Wendy were my first two," she said. "I'd studied the game enough and talked to enough coaches to know that you'd better have good pitcher and a good catcher. I'd never heard of Johnson County, but their coach (Ron Meinert) was a hall of famer and I knew they had some of the best players in the nation, so I trusted him. The things he told me about them were enough for me to know I wanted them to be a part of our program."
It wasn't the playing ability of the battery that garnered McGinnis' attention, though. It was a mailout from the school that found its way to her office and tempted her to read through it one night where she was working late.
"I was sitting at the office one night and had received this nice media guide from Johnson County Community College," she remembered. "I sat there and read every bio and marked three players in there I was interested in based on their bloodline and their history. Ann and Wendy were two of those three."
McGinnis started talking with Meinert and then with Shelton and McKibbin. She convinced the two to take a visit to campus, and Shelton's dad drove them to Jacksonville. The two would sign and then McGinnis would see them play for the first time in the 1995 NJCAA National Tournament in Hutchinson, Kan. Both made the All-Tournament Team.
"I saw them play for the first time after we signed them," McGinnis said. "We watched them play in the national tournament, and it was the first time I'd seen them in a uniform. I sat down and Wendy hit a home run, and I got excited and asked, 'Is that the player we're getting?"
For Shelton, now Ann Welsh, and McKibbin, they were sold on JSU. Once they came to campus and were face-to-face with McGinnis and the JSU campus, Welsh explains that she knew it was the place for her.
"I came from a junior college and was coming a long way to play for somebody that I'd just talked to and met only once," Welsh remembered. "But once I did that and was face-to-face and saw the school, it was one of those things where you realize 'This is where I'm supposed to be.' I wasn't worried about not being a part of a conference until my senior year."
Building The Roster
With her battery on board, McGinnis turned to local talent that was used to playing the slow pitch game to build the rest of her roster. That added to the challenge of getting ready for the move to Division I, using a roster of players that still had to learn the game they'd be playing.
"Ann and Wendy were the only two players on that 1995 team that had fast pitch experience," McGinnis said. "I just tried to get the cream of the crop from this area that were good athletes, that were gritty and that could make the adjustment to fast pitch."
One of those players was Rachel Stone, a Cherokee County High School alum that was currently playing slow pitch at Gadsden State.
"I knew Rachel because I'd watched her in this area and knew she was one of the best around, so I had in my mind that when she became a sophomore at Gadsden State I was going to go after her," McGinnis recalled.
Stone joined Shelton and McKibbin, knowing their first year would be a transition year that wouldn't allow for any postseason play and a combination of a Division II and Division I schedule. They just wanted to play.
Welsh recalled finding out that none of her new teammates or coaches had fast pitch experience, something she said "shocked" her at first but wasn't an issue once she met her team for the first time.
"At first when I found out none of the other players had ever played fast pitch I honestly couldn't believe it," she said. "But I never had another thought about it after that. Once we got out there together and all got to know each other, we all just jelled and played ball. Once I was around them and had a feel for how everybody was, I never thought twice about it."
It didn't matter to the newcomers that they didn't have a postseason, nor did it matter that their young head coach was still learning the game she was coaching. They all shared the same goals. They wanted to play and they wanted to please McGinnis.
"I've never been around a group of people that loved the game more, from the top of the lineup to the people that sat on the bench," Welsh said. "We all supported each other, and we worked as hard as we could at practice because we knew we had another ballgame coming up. I think it was just the love of the game. And I didn't want to disappoint Coach McGinnis. She had a way of making you dig deep and pull something out that may not have thought you had."
Stone, now Rachel Smith, gave almost the same response as Welsh when asked about McGinnis and her team.
"I just wanted to make Coach happy," Smith said. "In the fall, I wanted to run my mile as fast as I could run my mile. From the beginning of the training until the very end."
The 1995 transition season saw JSU post a 32-16 record and win games over the top three teams in the Division II rankings during the year. Despite having no postseason to play for, they enjoyed each game and took them one at a time.
"I didn't study teams then like I do now," Smith said. "I didn't know if the team we were playing was ranked. They may have told us after a game, but we didn't focus on that pregame. We just tried to go out there and beat who was in front of us. That was our mentality. Coach always has high expectations for every team that she puts out there. We didn't really know any better. We just tried to beat everybody that we played."
Home, Sweet Home
By the time 1996 rolled around, the team that had had to drive to Anniston to play at the Woodland Park complex and practice on the intramural fields on campus had a stadium. The baseball team had moved down the road to Rudy Abbott Field, allowing University Field to be renovated to host softball, completing Cole's goal for the program to have a home field when they started Division I play.
The Gamecocks debuted it with a 9-0, 8-0 sweep of Tennessee State on Feb. 15.
"For me it was really neat," Smith remembered. "I'd never had a home field at any point in my high school or college career. Every team I was on had always had to share a field with someone else, so coming to Jacksonville and being able to have a home field was really special for me."
Welsh had a field at Johnson County, but she described it as "a field with no dugouts and just benches on either side."
"When we moved into University Field, we didn't just get a home field, it was a stadium," she said. "There were bleachers and places for people to sit. It was special."
Even though the Gamecocks were eligible, the players don't remember focusing on the postseason. They didn't talk about how far they could go. They just talked about beating the team that was next on their schedule.
"I don't know that I even knew they had regionals when the season started," Smith said. "I don't think I knew how the playoffs worked. I'm sure coach did, but she never mentioned that to us until we got to the end. The expectation was to take it one game at a time and beat whoever was in front of us."
We Belong
The Gamecocks won their first 10 games of 1996 and were 29-4 on April 1. A team that had just wanted to play softball for the past two seasons was starting to realize that they belonged.
"At some point you do realize that," Welsh recalled. "Because we were playing in our conference and we were like, 'Hey, we're beating all of the people, so there is a chance that we can be on top."
On top is where they found themselves at the end of the regular season, with a 13-3 record in TAAC play and the top spot in the league's West Division. Shelton was named the TAAC Player of the Year and was joined on the First-Team All-TAAC by McKibbin, Stone and Jennifer Russo. McGinnis was named the TAAC Coach of the Year.
"That was our first year in the league, and I remember going into the banquet and everyone was like, 'Who is this team?," McGinnis said. "There were a lot of those teams that had been in it for a while and dominated that league. We took a lot of awards away at that banquet, and I remember leaving and telling our girls that they were looking down on us and I think that motivated them throughout tournament."
The Gamecocks won their first three games of the conference tournament in Buies Creek, N.C., to reach the title game unbeaten. A costly error forced an if-game with East Division Champion Campbell, forcing winner-take-all if game with the host Camels.
JSU won that game in extra innings, when Smith dropped a two-out hit just over the Campbell third baseman, sending the Gamecocks to NCAA play in the first season they were eligible.
"We were leading in the championship game a lost on an overthrow into the dugout, but then we came back and Rachel got the flare over third base that won the tournament for us," McGinnis recalled. "It just flared and hit the ground. It's still in slow motion to me."
McGinnis joked about a conversation she had with Smith not long before that moment. The senior was upset with herself about not hitting the ball hard, and her coach talked to her about how that didn't matter. Welsh recalled the hit, one she still talks about to this day with the players that she coaches.
"I still talk about Rachel's hit," Welsh said. "It's a good motivator for high school girls, because it doesn't matter what it looks like, and in the book, it doesn't show you what it looks like. As long as you hit it, it hits the ground and scores that run, it's a hit."
Smith remembers that tournament title being the defining moment in a great season for the 1996 team.
"I think we'd gotten some folks' attention throughout the season with our record, but I felt like winning the conference championship kind of sealed the deal for us," she said. "I remember coming back into Jacksonville and getting a police escort. There were people sitting out there waiting for us when we got back to congratulate us. I remember Coach (Jim) Skidmore and Coach (Bill) Burgess being there and them being happy that we'd pulled that off. I think after we won that conference tournament, people started to really say that we were for real."
The team that had no postseason to play for the year before and had no one expecting them to compete in Division I for years had done it immediately. It had won a conference title in its first season of competition. The only shot for those seniors that transferred from junior college wasn't over.
"After we won the conference tournament, we were just excited that there was more softball to play," Smith recalled. "Once we got the opportunity to get the play-in, we were just hungry. We wanted to find out how far we could go."
The First Dance
The NCAA Tournament wasn't what we know today. The Gamecocks had to travel to UNC Greensboro for a best-of-three play-in series that decided who made it to the NCAA Tournament.
They swept UNCG, 9-2 and 6-0, and the NCAA paired them with No. 1 Washington in the Seattle Regional. The program in its first year of Division I from Jacksonville State was on the game's grandest stage against the nation's top ranked team, a big step for a bunch that McGinnis described as a simple team.
"The thing I remember the girls being most excited about wasn't that we were going to play the No. 1 team in the nation," the coach recalled. "They we excited that we got to fly! That's what everyone was excited about. Talk about keeping it simple."
But the Gamecocks weren't in a simple regional. The first-year Division I program from Jacksonville was suddenly paired with teams from the Pac 10, Big 12 and Big Ten in their first taste of NCAA postseason play. Longtime broadcaster Mike Parris was shipped out west with the team to broadcast his first ever attempt at a softball game and had to do so on the game's largest stage.
"I'd never done a softball game before, so I was scared to death," Parris recalled. "We were going to play the No. 1 team in the nation and the No. 1 national seed in Seattle. I knew nothing. I didn't know a rise ball from a fast ball. But it was cool to me that we were in our first year in Division I and we were in a regional with the No. 1 national seed in Washington, Oklahoma State, who had a pretty good softball tradition, and Indiana."
They flew across the country to open against the Huskies, a team from the dominant league in the nation – the Pac 10 – with players they'd heard so many stories about. But they did so without intimidation, thanks in large part to their ace in the circle that had them ready for the challenge.
"Ann wouldn't admit it, but she really did give that team a boost of confidence when they went on the field," McGinnis said. "They knew that we had something special in Ann when she took the mound, but I think to this day they appreciate that even more."
For the first time all season, the Gamecocks knew something about their opponent. They took the eventual national runners-up to the wire, falling 2-0 in their NCAA Tournament debut. They would then fall to Indiana to end that magical run but not before proving themselves on the national stage.
"That was the first scouting report we did all season," McGinnis said. "We didn't know anything about anyone we played to that point, but we knew a little about Washington. They had the best pitcher in the nation and it was neat to see that, but Ann stood toe-to-toe with her."
Welsh remembers that moment more now than she says she did then. As almost 25 years have passed, she's learned to appreciate it even more as time goes by.
"It was a tremendous feeling," she said. "I do remember being out there and being very jittery warming up and to start with. The stadium was very different than anything we'd ever played in. They had a pep band that played and it was above our dugout. I remember thinking 'I wish that band would quit playing so I could concentrate.' Now that I look back, it probably is more amazing than what I realized as a player then."
Expectations Live On
The game has changed a great deal since that appearance in 1996, but thanks to the success of that first Division I team at JSU, the goal of each team since has been the same. McGinnis has taken eight more teams to the NCAA Regionals since that first trip, all in the past 13 years. One thing she's carried from that first trip is to slow down and enjoy it.
"One thing I regret about that regional is that we didn't know then to slow everything down and take it all in," she said. "I tell every team that you haven't experienced Division I softball until you get to play in a regional. I want that to be their goal every year."
With all of the success that has followed the 1996 team, McGinnis says all of that has been set up by that special first season. She talks about 1996 with every team, and even though it took 12 years to get back to the NCAA Regionals afterwards, it was that run that set the table for all of the trips that came after.
"I can honestly say that '96 team has extended my career," she said. "I can remember that first team that won it again, one of our players said 'Coach, do we have to hear about the 1996 team anymore?' I don't know if I could've stuck with it 10 years of never getting to win a championship or building or program up, but they let us taste success quickly and people wanted to be a part of it."
As for the players on that first championship team, they have a great sense of pride for what they started at Jacksonville State and the foundation they helped lay. They are also quick to point the finger at McGinnis for the constant in the entire run.
"Somebody had to start and lay the foundation," Smith said. "For me to look at the program now and where it is today, it lets me know how coach pushes people year-in and year-out. She doesn't settle for the previous years' successes. She wants every team to be better than the last team, and you can see that. Jacksonville State has been blessed to have her in one spot for that long, and you can see how every team has been better, the program has been better and the level of play has been better."
"The requirements that Coach McGinnis puts on athletes are very important and that has continued on from the very beginning," Welsh said. "She always talks about how this is home and we are a family, and that is so very true. I was on one of her first teams but I can meet athletes that she coaches now on the street and we have a connection and we are a family. It's amazing that she's gotten that out of so many people over so many years, and that's part of that success.
"Somebody had to start it, and I am so very proud that I was a part of that. And that makes me feel like I am a part of every group, just knowing I was there when it started. I'm proud of every team that she's coached and the successes that they have."
Saturday, March 14
Saturday, March 14
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Thursday, February 19
