Long Flight to Boca Nothing Compared to What Deifel Would Have Faced
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The next couple of weeks are a little bit of a rarity for Arkansas softball coach Courtney Deifel.
In back-to-back weeks, she will pack up her team for relatively long flights to Florida and then Arizona. It's a pair of trips that, if taken by car, would cover 5,000 miles round-trip. However, the tiniest of changes in her life's journey would have made this week's trip for six games in Boca Raton, Florida for the Paradise Classic seem like a quick run to Wal-Mart.
Somewhere inside, a part of Deifel will always be a Pac-10 girl. After all, she grew up in California and played her college ball at Cal. She even helped bring a national championship to the Golden State as a player in 2002.
When it came time to start her coaching career, she did what so many who came both before and after her would have done if given the chance. She spent her graduate assistant year in 2008 learning the craft under legendary softball coach Patty Gasso at Oklahoma.
From there it would have made all the sense in the world for her to head back to California where her connections and experience would have placed her square in the middle of one of the greatest softball wars of all time. The Pac-10, or Pac-12 as it became along the way, was in the midst of winning 10 national championships in 11 years spread among five elite programs.
Instead, ironically, the California girl found herself headed to the East Coast for an assistant coach's position at Maryland. She would eventually weave her way to Louisville and then back to Maryland where she became a head coach for the first time before finally landing at Arkansas.
However, had she gone the West Coast route, destiny would have landed her on the East Coast eventually anyway. If Deifel had found her way back to Cal or nearby Stanford, she would have found herself looking ahead to next year and trying to convince recruits of how much they're going to love the team bonding gained during a 5,600 mile round trip to play Syracuse in an ACC game, an extra 600 more than Arkansas will travel the first two weeks combined.
"It doesn't make sense to me you know," Deifel said. "I played in the Pac-10 days and then it turned to the Pac-12., I thought that was odd."
Of course, she might have ended up at UCLA, USC, Oregon or Washington, all of which will move to the Big Ten in a few months. That trip to Rutgers for a conference game would have had Deifel drag her players 5,500 miles if she ended up in Los Angeles and roughly 5,700 miles had she ended up at Washington.
"I think it's a new time in college athletics," Deifel said. "It's a new time in college softball, and so it's, it's strange. It's sad, and it's just really interesting to see now those West Coast teams have to travel across the country to play conference."
As the softball world adjusts to more change, it provides yet another major marker for the passage of time since Deifel was belting 13 home runs for Cal en route to a championship ring. It will mean one more impressive detail to which her future recruits won't be able to fully relate.
"Gosh, shoot, next year, or in five years, when I say I played at Cal in the Pac, some are going to be like, 'What's the Pac?'" Deifel said. "It's mind blowing to me because of the staple that they've been in college softball. And so it's sad."
So, with things changing so drastically in connection to her past, she's encouraging recruits to help her repeat a little bit of her history in the future.
"I think all of us adjust, but we talk about it here of just like recruiting and just kind of wanting our players to leave a legacy," Deifel said. "The best thing [players] can do is is recruit so that when you're my age, when you say I played for the Arkansas Razorbacks, people know it's a strong softball program and it's still known and you helped to build that."
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