Ironically, the same strengths and characteristics that marked the 2013 Nebraska softball team and its trip to the Women's College World Series re-emerged to help some of those players and coaches enjoy a digital social reunion.
What with almost everyone staying home these days amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Kiki Stokes, within roughly 24 hours, organized a group video conference in which 11 members of that 2013 team participated Monday night.
Made sense, Mattie Fowler figured, given Stokes, despite being a freshman on that team, had always been the most social, with an art for bringing people together.
"That's always been her personality," Fowler said. "That was one of her biggest leadership strengths on our team, too, was just kind of being the motivational leader and emotional leader."
Problem was, once everyone had logged into the video call, Stokes was absent, battling technical difficulties.
"We're all texting each other, 'Kiki, you're late to your own party! Where are you?' " Fowler said. "She couldn't get it to work."
In the upper right corner of the video conference screen was a laughing Rhonda Revelle. Get ahold of Mattie, she said. She'll straighten this out.
That's how it always happened in games, anyway.
"We always called on Mattie to fix things," Revelle said, "It's like we clicked right back into 2013 mode."
So Fowler stepped in and corrected the technical glitch, picking up a teammate who'd fostered a wonderful game plan.
"It was like our perfect leadership styles from the season," Fowler said.
Revelle, the veteran Nebraska coach, then pitched a few questions to her former players, many of whom are now coaches or teachers, and then mostly sat silent.
"I just let 'em go," Revelle said. "I just leaned in listening."
Certainly a productive, educational escape during unusual, trying times, not only for Revelle, but for those players who are now assistant college coaches, including Stokes at South Dakota St, Tatum Edwards (pitching below) at Nebraska-Omaha and Courtney Breault at Clemson.
"It was really wonderful listening to them click back into player mode, but with an adult perspective," Revelle said. "Most of them are coaching or teaching or a combination of both, so their perspective is with a different lens, but they could click right back to that player mode so quickly."
At one point, Revelle thought of former Nebraska volleyball coach Terry Pettit and his book, "Talent and the Secret Life of Teams."
"I'm sitting there going, 'This is exactly what Pettit means about secret lives of teams,' " Revelle said. "Six or seven years later, I'm sitting there, it's the coach going, 'OK, I know what my front door experience with this group is, but now they're letting me come through the back door of their experience.' It was just fascinating, and again through a lens of them in education in some fashion."
Every coach in the group felt heartache and disappointment with the cancelation of college spring sports, but perhaps nobody more than Breault, who'd spent two years helping build Clemson's program from scratch. This their inaugural season, the Tigers had won 12 of 14 games and were drawing home crowds of 1,500 when the season abruptly halted.
"She was really heartbroken," Fowler said. "She said they had gotten incredible support from administration. I know (football coach) Dabo (Sweeney) was at several of their games. That was a pretty cool story."
Team Accountability Key
Of course, the group also spent its share of time discussing the main purpose of the call – reminiscing about the 2013 season and Nebraska's magical run to the WCWS.
Fowler, now Nebraska's Senior Director of Development Operations, was a sophomore infielder on that team. She remembers a winning combination of hungry upperclassmen – they feel they didn't live up to expectations during a disappointing 2012 season – and a group of talented freshmen wanting to prove their worth.
"We weren't all best friends, but it was the most accountable I've ever felt with a group," Fowler said. "You couldn't really complain to anyone. They would've told you, 'Suck it up, move on, next game.' We were a really good group in that way, in that we were able to drop games if they didn't go well and move on."
Revelle agreed, noting Stokes, a freshman, initially being afraid of, or mad at, senior Brooke Thomason.
"But by close to the middle of the year, she started to understand what was driving (Thomason) more and really appreciated her," Revelle said. "Now as a coach, she's like, 'I wish every team had a Brooke.' "
Another trait that stood out about the '13 team, Fowler said, was how everybody excelled in their roles, and nobody grew comfortable in her position.
"There was enough parity throughout the team," Fowler said. "Coach Revelle was very strategic in using pinch-hitters and DHs to the point that nobody felt completely comfortable, but in a good way. We were all able to really push each other at practice but know that once game time came, if your name wasn't on the lineup card, we had the best bench ever."
A perfect team, this wasn't. Nebraska never swept a three-game conference series, always settling for two-out-of-three, even against lesser competition. That became symbolic when Nebraska, seeded No. 14 overall in the NCAA Tournament, won its regional and traveled to face No. 3 Oregon, which hadn't lost at home all season, in a Super Regional.
The Huskers won the first game of the three-game series, then lost the second.
"The first thing we said," Fowler said, "is we all kind of laughed, 'Eh, this is what we do. We go 2-and-1. We got this.' "
Nebraska found out what little chance most people gave the Huskers to upend Oregon when they arrived in Oklahoma City for the WCWS and discovered NU was the only school with no official team apparel for sale on site. Whoever was in charge of such matters just figured Oregon would win, therefore delaying the production of Nebraska shirts, caps and such.
The Huskers fell to Washington 4-3 in eight innings in its WCWS opener and lost a 9-8, 15-inning, 5-hour, 20-minute marathon to Florida to end its season at 45-16. Players have never liked talking about the Florida game, in particular, and mentioned it only briefly Monday night, to find out that nobody has ever bothered watching it.
"I think it was all so emotional," Fowler said about a game in which Nebraska forced extra innings with three runs in the bottom of the seventh, and kept the game alive with another improbable rally in the 10th.
"Everybody feels like there's something they could've done to win that game. But that was the kind of team it was. Nobody blamed anybody. We were all arguing over who should've won that game."
Said Revelle: "If I had to put it in a nutshell, it's they didn't want to let each other down. They had great respect."
Coping With Today
The group also discussed how they were dealing with the current pandemic and its effect on sports. Revelle, for one, has consulted coaching friends about the subject.
"You use your instinct," she said. "You talk to your peers. I've been on podcasts, a few conference calls with other coaches on what they're doing. I think we're just all trying to figure this out together.
"Let's just take gratitude, for instance. I think being grateful for things we took for granted, like always having athletics in our life in some fashion. Even when we're injured, we can still be a spectator, or even when we got old we still had sports.
"It's just getting back to always living from a posture of being grateful."
Huskers players – especially seniors Lexey Kneib, Tristen Edwards, Bree Boruff and Samantha Owen, who have their careers' fate in the hands of the NCAA – were "bummed, shock and disappointed" when learning of the season's cancelation, Revelle said.
Most players have returned home, but Revelle communicates with them a few times a week individually and will periodically have group video conferences.
"Any time you go through a deep adversity, it's going to affect everyone a little bit differently," Revelle said. "That's human condition. But as you move through it, especially the longer it lasts, it's going to teach you things about yourself.
"As you go through that, you understand you certainly can come out the other side a stronger individual because of that. But that takes some time, and that takes some guidance and some work."
Reach Brian at brosenthal@huskers.com or follow him on Twitter @GBRosenthal.
