Women’s softball co-captains Lorena De Abreu and Savannah Warner play catch during a pre-season practice session. Eric Le | Washtenaw Voice
By Brian Babcock
Staff Writer
Savannah Warner, Lorena De Abreu and several other Wolfpack softball players had the desire to play a club sport, but found themselves without a team due to lack of participation. Today, things are different.
Warner, the team’s captain, said she took it upon herself to build the team.
“I joined the team three years ago … at the first pre-season we had four girls show up every day with our coach. We couldn’t play any games because we didn’t have enough people,” said Warner.
The WCC women’s club softball team is currently projected to have a strong spring season in 2020.
“Then I decided I wanted to play some games, so next season we did some recruiting, and I just asked a ton of my friends who didn’t have any experience … a lot of them joined and were really good players who didn’t even know it before,” Warner said.
Ani Freeborn is one of the players who took on the sport.
“I never played softball before. I had always wanted to play it though and had always played golf … so I had that natural swing,” she said.
Freeborn said she looks forward to learning how the game works and challenging herself to get up to a more experienced softball level.
Today, the women’s softball team has almost a full team of players regularly attending the fall practices and it is projected that at least 18 will tryout for the team in Spring 2020. De Abreu, one of the team’s new co-captains said that student leadership plays a significant role in creating the team and will help sculpt its future.
“I’m looking forward to meeting all the girls and establishing a team we can grow with, seeing areas which we need to improve on, and making an impact on the softball team for future years to come,” De Abreu said.
Currently, the team has no coach for this semester, and their funding was cut.
According to Warner, this was done to help promote newer, growing programs like cross country.
Consequently this made Warner and De Abreu’s role as team captains harder. Despite these frustrations, the two captains took a step back and looked at the bigger picture: expanding college programs need money. So what did they do to get funding? They opened up pre-season practices to expand participation. While this is technically not allowed, a loophole permits student-led events to meet.
Matt Lucas, athletic director at WCC, said Warner was given the green light to hold student-led practices with help from the athletics department. Fall practices are held on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. Tryouts and games will be incorporated later in the spring.
Warner, De Abreu and the rest of the women on the softball team said they’ll welcome new players, regardless of experience. To get involved, contact WCC’s athletic department.
