40 Years of Bobcat Softball

Texas State softball played its first Division I season in 1985, marking the 2024 season as the 40th season of Bobcat softball.

In that time the program has seen over 1,100 wins, 11 NCAA tournament appearances, seven conference championships, seven conference tournament championships, has played in four different conferences, and had just four head coaches.

The inaugural season of Texas State softball was led by head coach Pam Wuestenberg. Wuestenberg coached the Bobcats for 10 seasons from 1985-1994. She was the coach when the program made the jump from Division II in the Lone Star Conference to Division I in the Gulf Star Conference.

Prior to being the head softball coach, Wuestenberg had been an assistant basketball coach at Southwest Texas State, but had prior experience coaching a fast pitch softball team out of Austin, coaching in high school, and she had been a graduate assistant at Northern Arizona.

When she took over the program back in 1984, Wuestenberg was offered just one scholarship to build her team with. With that scholarship, she split it up between three players she’d recruited: a pitcher, a catcher and a shortstop. 

Eventually, Wuestenberg recruited a student manager to help her with the behind-the-scenes work. Then, after petitioning for another scholarship to help get her to join the program, she got former Canadian pitcher Wendy Sofiak to join her team for a semester, and with those four players, she built her first team.

“I played with just those two, maybe three scholarships for the first four or five years of the program…” Wuestenberg said. “I finally went to [administration] and told them how we couldn’t get anything done. [The players] were struggling, I was struggling, so I compared what we had to what baseball had and they matched it.”

The match boiled down to both softball and baseball receiving roughly 25,000 dollars each for scholarships for their programs. They had the ability to give more players scholarships with this, but it wasn’t enough for a full roster.

From there, it was about finding success on the field in a new conference, though. After a 20-19 start to her first season, it was time to figure out a way to improve. The struggle Wuesternberg faced, though, was the lack of high school softball being played. It just was not offered in most public high schools, making it difficult to find players to recruit.

“When the state of Texas added softball as a high school sport, that was a major help. Not only for us, as college coaches, but for high school coaches…” Wuestenberg said. “Adding it to high schools added the pressure of ‘okay we have kids playing, how can we get them into college.’”

Once they had more scholarships and more athletes with the high schools adding the sport, next up was getting better facilities. 

When the team began in 1984, there was no field for the team to play on. They practiced on the city’s local slow-pitch fields and the city put bases on specifically for the Bobcats at fast-pitch distances. 

The teams home games? Those were played 40 minutes down the road in Seguin, Texas.

After three seasons of dealing with construction on the home practice fields in the city and playing out in Seguin, there were plans established to build a field for the university’s softball team. Built by the members of the community surrounding the area, they were able to get a field made. 

Since then, the field has undergone a bunch of phases, most recently in 2018. The field now has batting cages, bleaches, a turf field and a videoboard in its most recent remodel to become the Bobcat Softball Stadium we know today. 

After fighting to get the field built, Coach Wuestenberg left softball after the 1994 season to get an athletic certification. She was an assistant director to the academic certification officer for a while before getting her master’s degree and doing a doctorate program at the University of Texas. 

After her tenure, head coach Lee Ann Jarvis was brought in. Jarvis played part in one of the softball stadium’s renovations, which included bringing in the fences by 20 feet.

Under its original construction the field was 220 feet on the sides and 230 in the middle, Jarvis wanted the fences brought in by 20 feet each.

“She wanted more home runs,” Wuestenberg said. “She thought that would be a good way to get more people in the stands, and it probably was.”

Jarvis coached the team for five seasons while the team competed in the Southland Conference. In her final season with the school, the team went 34-21 for a 6th place finish in the Southland Conference, but won the school’s second Southland Tournament Championship. Also that season, Texas State made its first appearance in the NCAA tournament. 

Jarvis went on to coach at New Mexico State from 1999-2003. When she left, the first whisperings of now long-time head coach Ricci Woodard came to be. Woodard was a Texas native working as an assistant coach at Oregon, and she applied for the opening.

Woodard wasn’t given the job in 1999, though. The job was given to Bobby Reeves who carried the team to a 34-24 record in his lone season. Reeves coached just the 2000 season at Texas State before taking a job as the head coach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders. Reeves went on to be at Texas Tech for four years before finishing his career at Abilene Christian where he coached for nine seasons, his final season being in 2019.

Texas State still needed a head coach for the 2001 season, though. Woodard applied for the opening for a second time.

“Not a whole lot had changed in my world [since the previous opening],” Woodard said. She was still enthusiastic about the opportunity in San Marcos,

Woodard happened to be visiting Texas and was able to come back out and interview for the job again, this time being given the job. After her second time applying, Woodard felt good about what she could build in San Marcos.

“I felt like this would be a good place to build a program,” she said. “It just worked out that I was able to. Especially back when we were in the Southland, I knew we could compete day in and day out, and we did. But I also knew this would be a great place to recruit.”

Woodard did just that in her third season as head coach, earning a spot in the 2003 NCAA tournament with a 46-18 record that counted wins against Arkansas, Houston, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor, just to name a few. This was the program’s first at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. 

Woodard has earned four more at-large bids in her time since the first in 2003, in 2016, 2017, 2021 and most recently, 2023. In addition to her five at-large bids, Woodard has won over 800 games, made five additional NCAA tournament appearances with tournament championships, won seven regular season championships and is a five-time Conference Coach of the Year.

“The standard is the standard,” Woodard said. “It’s been the standard for 24 years and I don’t know how to deviate from that. The biggest thing for me is that I don’t know how to accept mediocrity, and every player here knows that.”

Now, 24 years into her career, Woodard has seen her program become a nationally recognized and respected program.

Gone are the days when coach Wuestenberg started this program that players would pick rocks out of the dirt of the local community field to play their games on. Gone are the early days of coach Woodard’s career where she and her team would prep their own field for games. 

After a start like that 40 years ago, now, nearly every game is broadcast on TV from a beautiful ballpark on Texas State campus that has a well-maintained turf field, stands for the fans to sit in, and a community supporting the program day in and day out.

Wuestenberg had to advocate for her players to have the necessities to play the sport all those years ago, but Woodard has continued to advocate for her players throughout her 24 years as well.

Whether that’s advocating for better resources and treatment of her student athletes, holding camps to fundraise for her program, or just being a resource of support for her team, Woodard has proved over the last two and a half decades to be an all-around elite level coach and person.

“There was a lot of things that improved as different coaches came in with different ideas and I think that’s how things grow naturally,” Wuestenberg said. “But Ricci [Woodard] is by far the best coach that we’ve ever had. She’s well respected with a great background and she by far has made the most significant changes and taken us to where we are now.”