On May 27, 2004, 12 innings into the No. 6 Michigan softball team’s first-round matchup against No. 3 LSU of the Women’s College World Series, Wolverines head coach Carol Hutchins made a decision.
Junior second team All-American right-hander Nicole Motycka allowed a run that put the Tigers on the board and chipped away at the 2-0 lead the Wolverines had just taken. Though Michigan held onto a one-run lead, Hutchins opted to bet on a fresh arm in the circle, switching out Motycka for sophomore right-hander Jennie Ritter.
The bet didn’t hit. Ritter’s passed ball on a 1-1 count yielded LSU the game-tying run. And in the 13th inning, the Tigers completed a comeback that sent Michigan down to the loser’s bracket, where they fell 5-4 to No. 8 Stanford and saw its championship dreams be put to bed.
It was a film the Wolverines had seen many times before, and they didn’t like the ending. From 1995 to 2004, Michigan captured the Big Ten regular season title eight times, won the conference tournament six times and earned seven Women’s College World Series berths. Yet each of those bids at a national championship came short, as West Coast and Southern powerhouse programs routinely carried off NCAA Championships while the Big Ten and the Wolverines were left in the dust.
About a year later, on June 8, 2005, the same old film — Michigan in the Women’s College World Series after a regular season in which it ruled the the Big Ten — was playing yet again.
But this time, the Wolverines would write a brand new ending, defeating No. 12 UCLA 4-1 in extra innings to earn their first national championship — the first program east of the Mississippi to do so since 1976. And anchoring Michigan from the circle was Ritter, pitching a complete game.
In doing so, Ritter had put her miscue from a year prior behind her. But the Wolverines’ crowning moment was redemptive for not just her, but rather for the entire program.
It was the endpoint of a season where Michigan redeemed itself time and time again on the road to glory — culminating in a national championship that 20 years on, stands alone in the Wolverines’ trophy cabinet.
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Michigan entered the 2005 season with 10 players from its 2004 squad and several highly touted freshmen recruits, earning the distinction of a preseason No. 8 ranking.
However, the Wolverines stumbled out of the gate, dropping its first game of the season, 7-6, against unranked Baylor. But in what would become a defining characteristic for Michigan all season long, the Wolverines found redemption by turning that loss into fuel for something greater.
“We came back,” Bonnie Tholl, then-assistant coach and current head coach for Michigan, told The Michigan Daily. “We won the next game, and the next game and the next game.”
The now fifth-ranked Wolverines won their next 32 games. In March 2005, Michigan was invited to the Kia Klassic in Southern California, slated to play highly ranked teams such as No. 24 Fresno State, No. 11 Texas and No. 1 Arizona.
The Kia Klassic posed yet another redemptive opportunity for Michigan, just on a much larger scale. Softball has long been regarded as a Western and Southern sport. But by winning a prestigious invitational tournament against some of the sport’s powerhouses from those top regions, the Wolverines had an opportunity to make a statement about both themselves and Midwestern softball.
And six straight wins later, the statement was made. The Bulldogs and Longhorns were both shut out, 6-0 and 7-0, respectively. And with the win against Fresno State, Michigan shattered its previous record of 22 consecutive wins.
Despite being the top-ranked team in the country, the Wildcats didn’t offer that much more of a fight as the Wolverines rolled past Arizona 6-2 for their first-ever win against a No. 1 opponent. And with it, they took both the Kia Klassic and the Wildcats’ No. 1 ranking — which they kept for the rest of the season.
“Anytime you are a school from the Midwest and you beat a Pac-10 school or big school from out east, I think that that sets the tone for the season,” then-freshman first baseman Samantha Findlay told The Daily. “Just because we’re in the Midwest, doesn’t mean we can’t compete with those teams that were, prior to us, winning consistently.”
By winning the Kia Klassic and earning the No. 1 ranking, Michigan had taken a sizable step toward revitalizing the image of Midwestern softball. But the road to the NCAA Tournament was still long.
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The Wolverines navigated that road to the tournament without incident. They captured the regular-season Big Ten crown with poise, cementing their spot atop conference standings with a two-game sweep of No. 19 Northwestern to wrap up the season. In doing so, Michigan also locked up the top seed in the Big Ten Tournament, where it pummeled through Michigan State, Wisconsin and the 22nd-ranked Hawkeyes en route to victory.
The Wolverines followed up their conference tournament title by cruising through the NCAA Regional, sweeping past Canisius, Seton Hall and North Carolina. Their next redemptive moment would come in the NCAA Super Regional, played in Ann Arbor at Alumni Field against No. 21 Washington.
In the first game, a four-run fifth inning propelled Michigan to victory. But in the second, the Huskies capitalized on the Wolverines’ offensive shortcomings, forcing a deciding Game 3.
With the championship dream on the line, Michigan’s offense woke up. The Wolverines scored 11 runs from 12 hits to run-rule Washington and punch their tickets back to Oklahoma City.
In the Women’s College World Series, Michigan made quick work of Texas and DePaul to advance to the semifinals. Lying on the other side was No. 11 Tennessee. The Volunteers had already fallen 3-1 to the Bruins, and needed two wins against Michigan to stay alive.
A grueling extra-inning affair in Game 1 gave Tennessee the first win of the series after a walkoff homer in the 11th inning, forcing a second game to decide who would play UCLA for the national title.
Just like against the Huskies, the Wolverines found their backs against the wall. But Michigan put itself in the driver’s seat early on and didn’t look back. Findlay singled in the first inning to put the Wolverines on the board, and in the fourth inning, junior outfielder Stephanie Bercaw’s two-run homer widened the gap. The Volunteers staged an attempted comeback with two runs in the fifth inning, but fell just short, as the final score read 3-2.
“Tennessee was the roughest turnaround,” Findlay said. “Because we played deep into the night, and that was before the three-game series started in the World Series. So we played deep into the night, and then had to turn around and be back at the field in the morning and play again.”
And for the first time ever, a team from east of the Mississippi River would play for the National Championship.
In the eyes of both itself and the broader softball community, Michigan’s heroics had perhaps been redemptory enough. Simply by making the National Championship and not giving up when they were down, the Wolverines had carried the flag for the Big Ten and the Midwest, going where no other Big Ten team had gone before.
But the job wasn’t finished yet.
“It was championship focus, for sure,” Tholl said.
And just three games of needing to channel that focus stood between Michigan and the grand prize.
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Fittingly, the Wolverines needed one final act of redemption to win the National Championship.
The first game of the final series was quiet for five innings before a five-run avalanche from the Bruins in the sixth inning buried Michigan. Ritter began to feel the strain of pitching her third game in 24 hours, hitting two batters and erring on a slap bunt at the top of the inning. After Ritter gave up two runs off a single, Hutchins opted to switch her out for sophomore right-hander Lorilyn Wilson, who was unable to stem the bleeding, putting the Wolverines in a familiar position — win or go home.
And with Michigan down 2-0 four innings into the second game, it looked as though that familiar headline — “UCLA Wins National Championship” — was set to reprint itself once again.
But in the fifth inning, junior catcher Becky Marx slammed a ball over the left-field fence for a two-run homer to jolt the Wolverines’ slumbering offense awake. Senior shortstop Jessica Merchant would follow with a two-run double to put the Wolverines in the drivers’ seat. An insurance run from Findlay in the seventh inning put the finishing touches on the victory and gave both teams everything to play for in the finale.
Unlike the first two games of the series, the decider was marked by stellar defensive play, as Ritter and Bruins right-hander Anjelica Selden traded blows from the circle. Trickling into extra innings, Michigan and UCLA remained deadlocked at one run apiece.
At the top of the 10th, Wolverines junior second baseman Tiffany Haas reached on a fielding error by the Bruins’ shortstop, advancing to second base while center fielder Alessandra Giampaolo singled to shortstop. And with two runners on base, Findlay stepped to the plate.
“I just saw a good pitch and took a good swing,” Findlay said. “And the rest is history.”
Findlay’s swing drove the ball over the left-field wall for three runs to catapult Michigan into a 4-1 lead. And for the Wolverines’ last push, Ritter took over to shut down the Bruins with three outs.
A program redeemed, and a sport turned on its head — Michigan, for the first time in its history, had won the National Championship.
By defeating the gold standard of college softball programs in the World Series, the Wolverines had brought an end to decades of Western and Southern dominance, and in the process, had relegated years of coming up just short to the back pages of their memory. And they had embodied that redemptive spirit all season long in the tenacity they demonstrated to claw victory from the jaws of defeat on multiple occasions.
“They weren’t afraid to fail,” Tholl said. “They had already failed, right? And so they were just determined that we were not going to feel that failure anymore.”
And by forgoing the fear of failure all season, even in the face of adversity, Michigan ensured that when the credits rolled on its season, unlike the years before, there would be no feeling of said failure. Rather, there was a feeling of joy — a kind the program had never felt before.
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In the 20 years since, the Wolverines have chased that feeling, with a litany of conference accolades and four more trips to the Women’s College World Series. And ten years on from the glory of 2005, in 2015, Michigan would come the closest to capturing it, losing to Florida in the championship game.
But ultimately, the feeling has eluded the Wolverines. In the gallery of film reels of Michigan softball seasons, still only one plays the ending they want.
