The pitchers have already begun to see the benefits of Roberts’ work in practice.

“She’s been so much help, because she provides a really critical and analytic eye for us,” Brown says. “I’ll be working on a pitch, and she’ll see things that I don’t think of.”

But Roberts’ influence is not limited to the team’s young hurlers.

“I’m just so glad that she stayed with us, because she may not realize this, but we need her so much,” says co-captain Margaux Black, also a pitcher. “She has the best eye out there, because she’s not pitching, she’s not focused on herself, but she can focus on everyone else.”

“It’s definitely helped me personally, and just having her there next to me—it’s comforting,” Black continues. “She’s my teammate, she’s also my roommate, we’ve gone through this whole thing together.”

During practices, Roberts focuses solely on the four pitchers—running workouts, working on situational awareness, taking notes, and debriefing after scrimmages.

And Roberts makes her hybrid role as a coach and teammate an advantage.

“Dana has turned an injury into the best thing for the team,” sophomore shortstop Jane Alexander says. “They have so much trust in her because she’s a teammate, and so it really helps our staff to have someone they trust and respect helping them to get better.”

Having had a taste of the coaching experience as an undergrad, Roberts sees it as a path she may someday follow—a proposition Black heartily agrees with.

“I’ve always enjoyed giving pitching lessons and instructing—I get a lot of pleasure out of that,” Roberts says. “And this has been really rewarding for me, using my knowledge to help the rest of the team. It will probably be a while until I have any freedom to do that, but somewhere down the road I’ll probably end up coaching.”

But for Roberts, that decision lies far in the future. In the present, there’s just under a month before Ivy play opens—and with it, the last shot at a second Ancient Eight crown for Harvard’s six seniors.

Because when it comes down to it, whether she’s hurling strikes on the mound or making notes on the bench, Roberts just wants to do what she can for her team.

“Surprisingly, once I made the decision to stop pitching, everything got a lot easier,” she says. “[Once I] was able to throw myself into it knowing that my goals for the season have changed and the game path that I’m trying to make has changed—it’s actually been really rewarding.”