Black History Month Feature: Bri Butler

Photo by: Shelley M. Szwast

February 24, 2022 | Softball

Bri Butler grew up in Evans, a small town in Georgia that’s about a three-wood and nine-iron down the road from Augusta National. Actually, it’s about 10 miles or so from the famous golf course, and many of Butler’s friends in high school would get jobs there during The Masters, doing things like selling water and t-shirts.

Golf, though, wasn’t Butler’s game. Neither was basketball. Or Karate. Or ballet. When the best golfers in the world were down the street from her, she’d be off playing her sport, and the sport of her family. Softball.

The sport led her to graduate high school one semester early so she could be part of the first team that Duke ever put on the field. She spent four years with the Blue Devils as a key member of the pitching staff, and she’d be part of a program that went from just starting out her freshman year to the NCAA tournament last spring, in Year 4.

Softball hasn’t exactly brought her to Princeton, her home these days. The computer science department and its graduate program did that. Still, she’s very much involved in the sport, working with the Tigers as their graduate student manager.

“I was always around softball,” she says.

She was introduced to the game in a familiar – and familial – way.

“I have two older sisters [Nivea, who is 14 years older than she is, and Robyn, who is 11 years older than she is] who played, and I would tag along to watch them. I decided I wanted to play too. I was around baseball and softball all the time. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t exposed to softball. I was happiest at the softball field, seeing my sisters play. They were my role models.”

These days she’s her own role model, and a role model for others. She applied to the Princeton graduate program after graduating from Duke in 3.5 years, and now she pursues both of her passions – softball and computers.

“I want to explore topics that I didn’t necessarily get a chance to while at Duke,” she says. “There’s Artificial Intelligence, for instance. I’m very interested in human-computer interaction. I’d like to use my graduate experience to dive into topics that I hadn’t had the chance to.”

She’s done a great deal already, even if she’s barely 21. Hey, she even wrote a novel in high school in less than one month. And yet, for all of that, she’s heard the comments.

“I’ve had people say like I’ve only gotten the things I’ve gotten because I was a diversity hire, that I made the company look good,” she says. “It’s very annoying to hear, and I don’t usually entertain it. Any reasoning I bring up won’t change their minds anyway. I just want to prove to myself every day that I’m good at what I do. I grew up in Georgia near the border of South Carolina. I’ve had some comments directed at me that were pretty mean-spirited. People told me I only got into Duke because I was Black. They’ve used affirmative action as a way to discredit me.”

As Black History Month winds down, it’s important to take a step back and hear the words she’s just said. It’s also important to view them in the context of her family, her background and her own accomplishments.

Her father was in the Army, stationed in places like Kosovo, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Germany and Belgium. His longest tour was in Iraq when she was very young, too young to remember.

She grew up with equal emphasis on her academic work and softball. She was outstanding at both, which led her to Duke when she was just 17 years old.

“I really wanted to be a part of the first softball team at Duke,” Butler says. “I graduated high school a semester early to be able to do that. It was a total shellshock for me when I got there. I was super young. Everyone had forms to fill out, and I had to send them to my parents to sign because I was still a minor. There were girls on the team who were fifth year players. They were so much older than I was. It was shell shock, but it was a cool shell shock.”

As odd as it seems, Duke’s first season with a softball team was just in 2018. If it was shell shock for Butler to be so young on campus, at least she was joining a program that had no established, well, anything.

“There were definitely some growing pains,” she says. “There were some traditions that we tried to start that didn’t quite take. We had a coconut with hair that we named ‘Nelson.’ That didn’t last.”

The Blue Devils went 29-27 overall and 13-11 in the ACC that first year. The team was under .500 her sophomore year but was off to a 23-4 start in 2020 when the pandemic shut the season down.

Her senior year saw Duke go 44-12 overall and 26-10 in the league, winning the ACC tournament for the first conference title for the program. The team won a pair of games in the NCAA regional in Georgia before being eliminated.

“I had no idea what to expect,” she says. “When I got on campus, I was just excited to be there. It was Duke, such an amazing school. It was pretty academically oriented, and here I was, playing for free. I thought I’d be lucky if I got to play at all, that I’d be lucky to see the field. That was my expectation – no expectation.”

She had a career ERA of 2.36, with a record of 22-10, and 181 strikeouts in 247 career innings pitched. Just as she had in high school, she graduated one semester early.

“It went by so fast,” she says. “The thing that stood out for me the most were the relationships I’ve made. They’re my best friends. If I hadn’t gone to Duke, I wouldn’t have gotten close to all these people whom I’m super glad are in my lives. We had so many great moments on the field, during big games, with crowds that were huge. The atmosphere was amazing. Just that feeling of stepping out onto the field, seeing my family in the stands, even between innings – that feeling is super crazy. It’s hard to even put it into words.”

While at Duke, she also dove into the world of computer science, earning four ACC All-Academic honors while she did. She was part of a group called D-Tech, which promoted women in technology fields.

After graduation, she decided to pursue her advanced degree, and she applied to and was accepted to Princeton. She wanted to use her final year of eligibility with the Tigers but is unable to because of the Ivy League rule against graduate student participation.

To stay close to the sport, she has joined the softball team as its graduate student manager, which is something of a precursor to possibly being an assistant coach. She had never considered coaching before, though now it’s something on her radar.

“I like to try new things,” she says. “So far, it’s been great.”

Will she go into coaching? Will she stay in the science field? Her upcoming internship this summer offers some insight to how she’s thinking.

“I’m not sure yet,” she says. “I definitely want to long term work in a field where I can use my education to be creative. I have an internship with Disney Imagineering Studios this summer. I love the idea of that. It’s super heavy on the tech side, but it’s also creative and fun.”

Princeton opens its season with five games in Florida this weekend. Butler has been balancing her new role with Princeton Softball with the requirements of a challenging academic program.

She’s also doing so in a field that traditionally has not had a large number of women, and even fewer Black women. Should her presence inspire others, she’s all for that.

“I’d like to think that I can be a role model,” she says. “At Duke we had an organization called ‘Black Girls Code.’ We worked with girls from late elementary school through high school. I’ve had girls reach out to me personally from that, even some girls from Duke. The learning curve is difficult. There’s a lot to learn about understanding machine learning and AI. There’s a lot of depth there. It can be intimidating. I’d hope that maybe some other Black women will look at me and say ‘I can do that too.’ I would love that.”

— by Jerry Price