“Grit, I think, is when challenged, how strong can you be to get through it?”
This is softball coach Jenny Allard’s best approximation of what is perhaps her team’s most popular term. Rather than fleshing out the semantics, however, both Allard and junior shortstop Rhianna Rich pointed to a series of games two seasons ago as the best explanation of the team’s grit.
The situation was almost too good to be true: Harvard and Dartmouth, two competitors in Ivy League softball’s North Division, were slated for a four-game series at the very end of the 2016 regular season. The Crimson entered with a 13-3 record, one game behind the Big Green. All Dartmouth had to do was win two games to advance to the Ivy League Championship Series, where South Division winner Princeton laid in wait.
It was a home-and-home series, so the first two contests took place at the very end of April at Harvard’s Soldiers Field. The Crimson, perhaps drawing on momentum from its existing six-game winning streak, walked away that Saturday with two one-run wins. All of a sudden, Harvard had flipped the script—one more win was all it needed.
The first game of the doubleheader in Hanover, N.H., also ended with a one-run margin, but this time in the Big Green’s favor. The next, and final, game became an all-important winner-take-all.
Entering the final inning of the final game, the Crimson’s season was hanging by a thread. Down 5-4 after squandering a 4-2 lead, Harvard sent junior Catherine Callaway up to lead off, and she promptly singled to kick off the comeback bid. A bunt single and a walk loaded the bases for then-sophomore Maddy Kaplan. As the balance of pressure shifted in the Crimson’s favor, Kaplan laced a double into left field to reclaim Harvard’s advantage. All told, the visitors hung four runs on the scoreboard, and pitcher Morgan Groom slammed the door in the bottom half of the frame to secure the victory and a postseason appearance.
“I think that was definitely a lot of people’s favorite moment because it showed that even though we were down going into our last inning, we were still able to push through that…,” Rich said. “It was about just being able to give it all you had.”
After the final out, the visitors jumped around on Dartmouth’s home field, rejoicing in having extended their season, but perhaps more importantly celebrating the team’s resolve, its refusal to give in to pressure, its tenacity. In other words, its grit.
In spite of a loss to Princeton in the best-of-three championship series, the Crimson had clearly made considerable strides. It further established itself as one of the perennial top teams in the Ancient Eight, and it proved that even against the odds it would not bow out easily.
This upcoming season marks Allard’s 24th season of managing the Harvard softball team. The team has been through ups and downs (but mostly ups) throughout her tenure, from a 6-8 league record in 2006 to a championship just a year later in 2007, one of six titles secured under her watch.
During the lengthy time Allard has spent at the helm, one will notice grit is one of the team’s ever-present themes, from preseason practices in the bubble, to the grind of the regular season, to postseason play.
Grit, like other sports buzzwords, is difficult to universally define. However, words are not always so important when Allard attempts to instill this mentality in her players.
“I think we talk about kind of grinding it out and working hard and doing those things, but...it’s not as conscious when you’re just putting them through challenges,” Allard remarked. “You don’t have to say, ‘Hey, we’re trying to develop grit in all of you.’”
Despite the fact that grit does not always need to be verbally explained, the team appears to have embraced the philosophy and has built a foundation of hard work and dedication upon it.
“I think grit really has been our word because throughout preseason and Ivies we go through a lot of ups and downs,” Rich noted. “Grit really explains that we dig deep within ourselves, that we’re playing for each other, and we’re able to come out on top of any obstacle that we face so we can get the job done. We don’t back down to failure.”
Given the demanding travel early on in the season, it seems impossible for the entire team’s roster to perform at peak capacity during the tournaments, especially since they will still be shaking off winter rust. But Allard says she tries to motivate her players to get as close to that benchmark as possible.
“In order to be successful, you’ve got to grind out a lot of work and a lot of time in these games,” Allard noted. “We’re going to go to Florida, [and] we’re going to play five games in a weekend. I mean that’s a lot of mental grit.”
The sheer length of the schedule is also a factor in the team’s adoption of the grit philosophy. This year, the Crimson is slated to play 42 games in just over two months, as the regular season spans from Feb. 23 to April 29.
“You take one game in softball—it may not be as physically challenging with the running as lacrosse, soccer, basketball, hockey, the constant skating—but the mental stamina you have to have to play two games in a day is extraordinary,” Allard added. “So I feel like we really focus, and the team has focused on, really being in the best physical shape because you break down and you make mistakes when you get tired. I think they’ve really embraced this idea of kind of grinding it out.”
Typically across sports, grit is attributed to individuals—those players who seem to give maximum effort in every competition, who scrape and claw for wins, who go above and beyond their sometimes middling abilities to contend with the best of the best. For Harvard softball, though, grit is simply a team concept.
Neither Allard nor Rich would rush to point to any individuals who stood out as more gritty than the rest, instead opting to describe the entire team as a group which embodied that concept. Rich noted that each individual functions as her own leader, so instead of depending on others to get the job done in a tight spot, each member of the team is capable of producing in any situation.
“Over my 24 years? Yeah there’s a lot of gritty players,” Allard said. “Some of them came in pretty gritty, some of them developed that grit in college. One of the things that they’re embracing this year is finding a way—finding a way when it’s hard, finding a way when you’re challenged, finding a way when you’re down, finding a way when you’re tired. You’re calling upon the grit that you have to be strong in those situations.”
One gritty individual moment that Allard settled on, however, was then-sophomore Katie Duncan’s performance in the circle against Princeton in last year’s championship series.
After scoring 32 runs in four games to close out the regular season, the Crimson advanced to the championship series for the second consecutive season. Princeton pitcher Claire Klausner completely silenced Harvard’s hot bats in the opening game, posting a shutout with eight strikeouts.
Though the offense could not get anything going against Klausner, Duncan and the defense behind her kept the Crimson in the game until the final frame. Despite allowing 13 baserunners, Duncan threw six shutout innings to match Klausner frame by frame. Only in the seventh did she falter slightly, allowing a walkoff single after recording one out.
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Duncan was up against no lightweight that day. Last season, the Tigers paced the conference in runs scored with 205. Columbia tied them for that mark, but Princeton reached it in five fewer games. The Tigers were also the only team with a collective batting average above .300, and their 134 strikeouts were the fewest among Ivy teams.
“We ran a defense to shut down their offense and we lost, 1-0,” Allard recalled. “That was a gritty game by Katie Duncan. She threw extraordinary.”
In 2018, it appears as though grit will be at the forefront of Harvard softball’s mentality once again. Several key contributors are getting their bearings after returning from lengthy injury rehabilitations, and a schedule makeover means that the Crimson plays a handful of extra games.
“I’m sure there will be things that we haven’t seen before with the new schedule, and…[making] sure that we’re giving it all we have is going to be really important,” Rich said. “And not give into the failures that we encounter.”
Coming off consecutive seasons of losing in the Ancient Eight playoffs, Harvard has set a high bar for itself, especially considering its limited roster turnover compared to other top teams in the conference. Sometimes top teams can become complacent, expecting past impressive performances to continue unabated. However, it seems apparent that the Crimson will continue to exhibit grit in each and every game in pursuit of its ultimate goal: an Ivy League title and a trip to the NCAA Regionals.
—Staff writer Jack Stockless can be reached at jack.stockless@thecrimson.com.
