A visitor to the office of Harvard softball coach Jenny Allard could guess correctly from the piles of papers strewn about her desk that she is a busy woman. The casual observer may also note from the smiling faces on the various team pictures adorning her walls that she has enjoyed her time coaching at Harvard.

But you’d have to dig around—in the back corner of the room, specifically—to find any evidence of Allard’s illustrious playing career in the sport.

“I’m not one to stick a lot of awards up on my wall,” Allard says, as she searches for a certain piece of hardware. “Ah, here it is.”

The plaque produced by Allard, though modest in size, certifies her selection as one of 17 women to the Silver Anniversary team at the University of Michigan.

“There are some tremendous athletes that have gone through Michigan softball, and to be considered one of them is just a tremendous honor,” Allard humbly admits.

Looking back through the history books, though, it would be difficult not to consider Allard one of the most influential players in the 25-year history of the Wolverine program. An All-American and Big Ten Player of the Year, Allard was at one point selected as both the team’s Most Outstanding Player and its Most Outstanding Pitcher. Allard graduated in 1990 in the top four all-time in 15 hitting and pitching categories and was named to the Big Ten All-Decade Team in 1992—quite an accomplishment for a sport only entering its second decade at the time.

And now, another decade later, Allard is the winningest active coach in the Ivy League and has the highest overall winning percentage in program history. The Crimson has finished in either first or second place in each of Allard’s eight years at the helm and the easy-going skipper led Harvard to its first of three Ivy titles and its first of two NCAA Tournament appearances. It would not be a stretch to consider Allard one of the nation’s finest coaches.

But statistics of success and accounts of accolades aside, Allard’s story is emblematic of the growth and evolution of softball in the past quarter-century. Her career parallels the rise of the sport’s popularity and its increased national profile. What’s more, as a coach in the non-scholarship Ivy League, Allard’s balanced philosophy and particular brand of leadership has translated to more wins on the field without corresponding sacrifices in the classroom.

There’s a reason that team pictures and article clippings vastly outnumber any awards on Allard’s walls—the accolades were, and continue to be, far from her main objectives of winning as a competitor on the field and as a mentor and teacher off of it.

Go East, Young Woman

Raised in Southern California, an area she describes as the “hotbed of softball,” Allard played many sports growing up, primarily focusing on softball and soccer. Asthma forced her to ultimately quit soccer in favor of softball, but looking back, that decision was probably for the best.

After various successes in high school and stints on the national under-18 and Junior Olympic teams, Allard found herself heavily recruited by a host of powerhouse programs in her home state. It was a visit to a fledgling program in the Midwest, though, that caught Allard’s fancy.

Allard settled on Michigan—a school that had yet to win a conference title and was far from the nationally successful programs of UCLA and Cal State-Fullerton—because, as she describes it, it “just felt right.” Landing Allard was a big coup for the Wolverines, as she was the first big-time recruit to leave the cozy confines of California to take a chance on a program out east.

The chance paid off for both Allard and Michigan, as the Wolverines soared into contention for the Big Ten crown on a yearly basis. And though Allard did not win a conference title at Michigan or make the NCAA tournament as a player (she would later make her first visit as Harvard’s coach in the 1998 tourney), her decision to leave California was significant.

For starters, it sparked Michigan’s (and the Big Ten’s) recruiting efforts and helped draw some of the nation’s premier talents away from the SoCal softball “hotbed.” Secondly, this dispersal of talent ultimately led to the increased national popularity of softball, which had until then been considered a second-tier sport in most parts of the country.