25 Years Later: Princeton's Run to the Women's College World Series
5/25/2020
Along with its primary meaning of remembering those who gave all for freedom, Memorial Day has great significance in college sports.
Lacrosse fans gather in an NFL stadium as the men’s Division I champion is crowned. The Road to Omaha is revealed for college baseball teams. Those headed to Oklahoma City for the Women’s College World Series have emerged from the celebratory pile a day or two earlier and have begun to set their focus on their next opponent.
While this Memorial Day won’t have any of those moments after COVID-19 claimed all 2020 NCAA spring championships, the day this year happens to mark 25 years since the Princeton softball program made its own first appearance in the WCWS.
On May 25, 1995, on the same field on which the 2020 NCAA Division I softball championship would have been won, Princeton, just a year after becoming the first Ivy League team to play in the NCAA tournament, won its way to the final eight and began its WCWS against a program that had won three of the last four NCAA titles, Arizona.
It was a journey whose possibility was very real at the time to those who were a part of it and whose improbability every Ivy team since 1997 has had to realize.
From when it began in 1982 until the current 64-team, 16-regional format began in 2005, the NCAA tournament’s path has evolved. Regional rounds may have once been given the designation as Northeast, but not all the teams that won those regionals were based in the geographic region. Adelphi made it to the WCWS in 1984, 1985 and 1988, as did UMass in 1992 and UConn in 1993 as the tournament expanded from 15 or 16 teams through 1987 to 20 teams in 1988. Those were the only true northeastern teams to make it to the WCWS over the event’s first 13 iterations.
I’m proud of getting to the World Series both times and the postseason, but what I’m as proud of anything is of the relationships that my student-athletes have maintained and that they have and that I have with them. I’m really proud of that. The wins are awesome, the losses were terrible. Some stand out on both sides more than others, but I’m really proud of the relationships and of the softball family that we were able to create.Cindy Cohen, head coach 1983-2000
In 1994, the field expanded to 32 teams, and the Ivy League had the chance to send one of those 32 teams if it could win a best-of-three play-in series against the Patriot League champ. Princeton swept through the league that year at 10-0, winning doubleheaders against Penn, Yale, Harvard, Brown and Cornell to earn the bid to the play-in series against Lehigh. After winning that in two games, Princeton was off to a regional in Lafayette, La., with Utah, home-state program McNeese State, and host Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Utah, which fell in the regional final to Southwestern Louisiana, dealt Princeton both its losses on either side of an elimination-game win for the Tigers over McNeese State.
Three wins short of Oklahoma City in 1994, Princeton entered the 1995 season with confidence, and, thanks to the famous Rodgers and Hammerstein play, a soundtrack.
“I remember it just being so incredibly exciting, and we started that season, it was almost like we were willing it to happen, like we were going to go,” pitcher Maureen Barron ‘97, née Davies, said. “We were singing that song, Oklahoma. We sang it all season long, and then all of a sudden, here we were, headed to the World Series.”
The Tigers had reason to think they’d have another good season in 1995, returning reigning Ivy League Player of the Year Stacy Thurber ’96 and Barron as the ’94 Ivy Rookie of the Year as two of the team’s six first-team All-Ivy League honorees from 1994 that would be back in ’95, plus second-team honoree Amy Whelan ’96 and honorable mention Michelle Morale ‘97. Karen Drill ’94, who helped Princeton complete the Ivy awards sweep as the 1994 league Pitcher of the Year, had graduated, but Barron, complemented by Kristi Jelinek ’95, stepped up. The pair shared all but two of the team’s 62 decisions on the year, with Barron going 27-7 and Jelinek 20-6. Those remain two of the program’s six all-time 20-win seasons by a pitcher. Barron's 27 wins surpassed Drill’s 22 from the year before to set a program record that lasted one year, until Barron broke it with 28 in 1996. That mark has stood since.
Tallahassee, Fla., hosted the first 14 games of the season for the 1995 Tigers, a run that ended with a 3-1 win over 14th-ranked Missouri and a 3-0 loss to No. 8 Michigan, sending Princeton back north with a 9-5 record and a spot in the USA Today Coaches poll at No. 24.
Princeton almost never stopped winning once it returned from the spring trip, going 32-1 over its next 33 games, splitting the home-opening doubleheader with Rutgers as the lone loss in a run that lasted until the final days of April and included a 12-0 Ivy season, up two games from 1994 as Dartmouth gave the league seven softball teams until Columbia made it eight in 2000. At the end of those 33 games, Princeton was ranked 21st in the nation.
In what became a preview of the soon-to-come NCAA regional tournament for Princeton, the Tigers hosted UConn, UMass and Hofstra for the Princeton Invitational, going 2-2 with a split against UConn and a loss to Hofstra. Little more than a week later, Princeton went to Hofstra for a twinbill and got swept, including an 8-0, run-rule loss in the team’s final game before the NCAA play-in.
It was kind of remarkable to get there and it was incredible to be playing on the field with that caliber of team that we were facing, and to compete with some of the best players in the country, best players in the world on some of those other teams. I’ll never forget those days. They were some of the best memories of my softball playing career, going through that with my teammates.Maureen (Davies) Barron '97
Cindy Cohen, the team’s coach since 1983 and who would win 560 games over an 18-season tenure at Princeton that concluded in 2000, kept things light.
“We did something fun the next day in practice,” Cohen said. “I think the team expected me to be upset, and I always tried to be something different than what they were expecting. We played Izzy Dizzy and games, and the truth of the matter is, we didn’t play well that day and our best players didn’t play well, and if we were going to win, our best players had to play well, and I was really confident that we could.”
For the most part, after being swept by Hofstra, Princeton did play well. Even so, the team’s ticket to the field of 32 wasn’t all smooth sailing.
The 1995 play-in matchups put the Ivy League champ against the winner of the Northeast Conference, which happened to be nearby Rider. Though Princeton won the first game of the best-of-three 7-2, the Broncs stayed alive with a 2-0 win in the second game, giving up six hits and two walks to Princeton without any being costly.
That didn’t become a trend. One loss away from the season being over, Princeton again had six hits and took advantage of four walks and two Rider errors to push across eight runs and end it early. Barron, who had thrown 10 1/3 innings the previous day while giving up one earned run on seven hits and a walk, throwing the final 3 1/3 in the second game after Princeton fell behind, came back to give up just two hits and a walk in the five-inning series-clinching win.
“I wasn’t sure about the mood of the kids coming into the game,” Cohen said that weekend. “But in retrospect, I guess it was a quiet confidence. This is a veteran team that plays with a lot of confidence, regardless of how our play has been as of late.”
The confidence was righteous, and Princeton was in the NCAA regional, which came to the Class of 1895 Field on Friday, May 19. It ended up being an identical field to the Princeton Invitational three weeks earlier.
That meant that Princeton would have to get through some of the same teams that led it to a 2-2 record on that recent weekend, starting with a Hofstra team that went 3 for 3 against Princeton during the regular season by a combined score of 20-7. A loss in that game would mean Princeton would have to win four other games over three days to win the regional.
I just remembered going into that season thinking, if we don’t do this, we’re going to let the seniors down. I remembered thinking, we have to try and do this because we might not have this shot again. We knew that the team chemistry was just really good and we worked so hard in the offseason, so for me, it was just kind of like, if not now, when? I remembered thinking that this was the chance of a lifetime.Tara Christie Kinsey '97
A Morale grand slam in the second inning put Princeton up 4-0, and after a five-run fifth put Hofstra up 5-4, Princeton pulled even in the bottom half of the inning and added four more in the sixth to avoid the long climb back through the elimination bracket. Ten runs, all in the fifth and sixth innings, allowed Princeton to roll past UConn and into the regional final, where a 5-0 lead after four innings put Princeton on the road to a 6-2 win over UConn and Oklahoma City.
If getting past Hofstra was a hurdle, Princeton’s opening opponent at the WCWS would be … a pole vault? Climbing a mountain? Whatever the metaphor, if Princeton wanted to win its WCWS opener, it’d have to knock off Arizona, which had won the last two and three of the last four NCAA titles entering 1995.
Barron had the ball for every inning during Princeton’s stay in the WCWS, starting by facing the two-time defending national champs.
“I’m sure I felt a certain amount of pressure, but I also know that that team, it wasn’t any one person that created our success on that journey, it was all of us together. Every part of me knew that they had my back and that’s how we got to the World Series,” Barron said. “It took a lot of pressure off my back because I believed in my teammates behind me, and they tended to always pick me up.”
Even though it was Princeton’s first time in Oklahoma City as a team, both the venue and some of the other players there made it a little more familiar. With Princeton’s national – and with Barron, from Canada, international – recruiting footprint, the team had three players from California but 15 others from nine other states. It was a roster with more geographic diversity than any other in the WCWS field, as the southwestern corner of the country supplied most of the roster for teams like nearby Arizona, Cal State Fullerton, UCLA and UNLV, and at least a few players each to more distant teams in Iowa, Michigan and Southwest Louisiana.
Thurber, whose hometown team from Fullerton, Calif., didn’t leave the state to fill its roster, had been there and done that when it came to playing at the ASA Hall of Fame Stadium.
“We had also played at Oklahoma City in club softball, so we had already been at that venue,” Thurber said. “A lot of the players that I played with in club softball in high school, I remember seeing a bunch of them there, whether they were on the Arizona team, the UCLA team. What was fun was to kind of see the surprise on some of my prior club teammates’ faces in seeing the Princeton program there. To get there was a sweet accomplishment.”
Pfeiffer, Princeton’s cleanup hitter who finished with an Ivy-best .407 average on the season, helped get one program to OKC and ended up seeing another there that wanted her as well. It was the chance to play on both sides of Elm Drive, spending her winters at Baker Rink, that helped sway her to Princeton, something she couldn’t do in Ann Arbor without a women’s hockey team.
“(Michigan) was the first college that really came into my home to try to sign me early,” Pfeiffer said. “I was, at the time, playing hockey and in contention to make it to the Olympics. Princeton was the total package that I was looking for, with education but also the two sports that I wanted to play in college.
“It was really cool, though, to see Michigan there because I did know quite a few of the players. I’m really glad that things worked out the way they did,” Pfeiffer said. “I had a lot of friends on the Michigan team, but it just kind of solidified to me that I made the right choice. It was nice to see them, and it kind of gave me a little bit of pride when I knew they were in the stands watching. I wanted to play the best I could to show them that the Ivy League could compete too. I was very happy how my teammates conducted themselves.”
Everybody knew about Princeton. It wasn’t like going into a regional area where somebody was like, who’s Princeton? In that regard, it really definitely opened some doors.Cindy Cohen
The Princeton-Arizona game led off the tournament, and the Wildcats jumped on the Tigers early with three runs in the first. Pfeiffer led off the second with a double and Whelan picked her up with a base hit for Princeton’s only run as Arizona ended it early with five runs across the fourth and fifth innings in a 9-1 win.
Pfeiffer and Traci Fox ’96 each had two of Princeton’s five hits, with Whelan getting the other.
“I honestly didn’t really put any of my stats together at that time. I wasn’t thinking about my production for the game,” Pfeiffer said. “I wanted to have more competitive games, but at the same time, looking back now, I’m proud that I was able to at least contribute in any way I could in the games. I just remember being very disappointed that we didn’t compete better, but we did the best we could.”
After an off day, Princeton met UNLV with the winner getting to stay in the tournament. Princeton out-hit the Rebels 8-5 and saw UNLV commit three errors, but the Tigers left runners on base in six of seven at-bats in a 2-1 loss.
“We went out there to have a good time, and as we got to watch other teams play, honestly, of all the times we were in a national tournament or a regional tournament, that’s the one game I really feel like we could have won that game,” Cohen said. “I’m not going to be arrogant and say we should have won that game, but we really could have won that game. I felt like we proved, at least to ourselves, I’m not sure to who else, but probably others, that we belonged, and I was proud of that.”
So ended a season that saw Princeton set program records for wins (49), longest winning streak (29), runs scored (402), hits (569), batting average (.341), doubles (108), triples (27), RBIs (328) and stolen bases (70, tied). All are still program records except for longest winning streak and stolen bases, which the ’96 team beat with 37 straight wins and 71 stolen bases.
Even a quarter-century later, players from the ’95 team still stand atop Princeton individual records. No one had more career at-bats than ’95 leadoff hitter Jen Babik ’95, whose 193 ABs that season remain a record. Thurber’s 175 career runs and 236 career hits remain program records, as do Babik’s 59 runs in ’95 and Thurber’s 79 hits in ‘94. Pfeiffer, who doubled in the Arizona game, is Princeton’s career (79) and season (26) leader in that category, and no one tripled more than Babik in a career (21) and Morale in a season (11, ’95). Pfeiffer also holds program records for career extra-base hits (99), career RBIs (164), and season RBIs (68). Morale’s 35 extra-base hits in 1995 remain the program’s season record. Career stolen bases? Tara Christie Kinsey’s 56, since equaled twice but unsurpassed. Her 28 steals in ’96 are still a record. Thurber’s 54 career sacrifices remain the record. Tara Pignoli ’95 drew 88 walks in her career, since equaled but unsurpassed, and Babik’s 35 walks in ’95 remain the standard, as do her 569 career assists and 165 in a season (’93).
I think we were super excited and a little bit nervous and in some ways, because we had never been there before, we didn’t even know what we were walking into. But that team, the amount of heart on that team is something I’ve never experienced since, probably.Maureen (Davies) Barron '97
Barron still all but owns the program’s pitching records, including starts in a career (109) and a season (33, ’96), complete games in a career (86) and a season (27 in ’95, shared with Drill), innings in a career (732) and season (225, ’95), shutouts in a career (32) and season (13 in ’96, shared with Drill), and wins in a career (83) and season (28, ’96). Barron, who took over the program as head coach for seven seasons beginning in 2001 to follow Cohen, was also Princeton’s career strikeout leader (596) until she coached the two players who passed her in Erin Snyder ’06 (819) and Kristen Schaus ’08 (833).
With the success came the accolades. Pfeiffer was the 1995 Ivy League Player of the Year and Jelinek was the Pitcher of the Year as Princeton put eight players on the first team All-Ivy League with three more on the second team. The awards came off the field too, with Babik and Thurber earning two of the 11 places nationally on the CoSIDA Academic All-America team. While also standing as one of four winners of the von Kienbusch award, given to the top female senior student-athlete at Princeton, Babik was the winner of Princeton’s Class of 1916 Cup, given to the senior student-athlete with the highest GPA in the class, earned an NCAA post-graduate scholarship, and topped it off with a Rhodes Scholarship.
The team’s success in the mid-90s also just made for more softball, as all six players in program history to have played more than 200 career games were part of the ’95 team, in Babik, Thurber, Whelan, Morale, Pignoli and Fox. The ’95 team itself includes the only nine Tigers players to play in more than 58 games in a season.
In ordinary times, perhaps the softball world would be celebrating another team making a breakthrough run to Oklahoma City this week, alongside the teams from the Pac-12 and SEC that have come to dominate the WCWS field. Back on campus, Princetonians would be preparing to mint another set of graduates at the end of a long weekend that begins with Reunions and continues through Class Day and ultimately graduation on the first Tuesday in June.
But, as we all know, these are not ordinary times, not when the WCWS has been forced quiet for a year, not when there will be no Reunions this year for the Class of 1995 to return for its 25th, not when the nearly two decades’ worth of players Cohen coached won’t be able to take part in the annual pre-Reunions reunion at her home. As it has with so many other interactions this spring, a Zoom call will step in.
What it loses in the face-to-face element of Reunions, the 2020 stand-in may gain in participation. With Princeton’s geographic reach, while some alumni may return annually for Reunions, others travel only for their milestone years, like the 25th for the Class of ’95.
“My heart goes out to the 2020 class whose senior season just got canceled. I also feel bad for the Class of ’95, their 25th reunion getting canceled,” Thurber, from the Class of ’96, said. “It’s kind of neat that this Zoom call is going on because it wouldn’t have been a reunion I would have been able to get back to, because it’s not our big year. It’s an added bonus to be able to get to see some teammates in the Class of ’95. They had a great class and a neat nucleus and some great leaders on our team. Sometimes at Reunions, you’re only seeing your exact class because that’s your big year, and you miss out.”
Princeton returned to the WCWS the following year, getting through Canisius in the play-in before sweeping Boston University and UMass to make it to Columbus, Ga., where the WCWS was held in 1996 as a test run for the Olympic softball tournament there two months later. Washington and Southwestern Louisiana dealt the Tigers defeats in Georgia, and though Princeton has made the NCAA tournament seven times in the years since, the 1995 and 1996 teams remain the only ones in both Princeton history and Ivy League history to advance out of the regional round. The closest an Ivy team has come to the WCWS since ‘96 was in 2012, when Harvard won two games at its regional to make the regional final against Washington, still four wins away from OKC.
It was really important to me to represent the Ivy League and to do the best we could to show that we belonged there and that we could compete with the teams. Being a program that doesn’t get to play nearly as many games as the rest of the teams that were there and we don’t have any athletic scholarship opportunities, it meant a lot for me to just be there, but I also really was concerned with just showing up and competing really well.Mandy Pfeiffer '97
So, while another Ivy team making a run to the WCWS is improbable, it’s not impossible. The league has its annual berth in the field of 64, each of whom is five straight wins away from a spot in the final eight.
“The underdog mentality is a special kind of mentality, and I think if you’re a Princeton athlete, you have to have the desire to prove people wrong if you’re going to play on the national stage,” Christie Kinsey said. “That’s why people went crazy when the men’s basketball team beat UCLA (in 1996), it was the same feeling, the David and Goliath moment, and on some level it felt like that.”
Beating the odds, of course, is appealing to a Princeton student-athlete.
“I regularly say that my experience in being a part of something where you’re aware of how special it is while it’s happening, you’re doing something that’s never been done before and that you’re upsetting or disrupting a status quo, which is the underdog mentality of it all, that has informed so much about how I see the world and the kind of leadership I’ve tried to provide in my life,” Christie Kinsey said. “I think of it as such an important part of my Princeton experience, but also just how I think of the kinds of communities I want to be a part of, was kind of set in those moments where I thought, oh my gosh, we could be the first, we could disrupt the order, the natural pecking order, if you will. That was incredibly exciting, to prove people wrong.”
