Scots Sports Superiority, part one: On courts and fields, the competitors of Maryville College women’s athletics settle for nothing less than success
EDITOR’S NOTE: Maryville College was awarded the Collegiate Conference of the South Women’s Commissioner’s Cup for athletic success during the 2023-24 academic year. This is part one of a three-part series examining everything that made it possible.
When Courtney Baine ’24 grounded out to first, bringing the Cinderella story of the Maryville College softball team’s most recent season to an end, Athletics Director Sara Quatrocky could finally take it all in.
The loss, of course, was disheartening. The Scots, turned away from the Super Regionals by Berry College, finished the year with a 35-13 record, a remarkable run in more ways than one. It was only Coach Jill Moore’s second year at the helm, and along the way to two victories in Montgomery, Alabama, for the regional round of the NCAA Division III Softball Championship, the team came out on top of the Collegiate Conference of the South post-season tournament.
Having one team at a school the size of MC make it to NCAA tourney play would have been an honor, Quatrocky said. But she’d been here once before already, when the MC women’s soccer team received a similar at-large bid last November. Coach Pepe Fernandez’s 2023-24 squad also brought home the CCS championship trophy, and both the men’s basketball and baseball teams would follow suit in the coming months.
The hardware, however, doesn’t do justice to the whirlwind journey throughout the 2023-24 academic year of the women student-athletes who wear the orange and garnet. The accomplishments are notable, but so too are the challenges the players and coaches had to overcome. Consider:
- Coach Brienna Laskowski was tapped to lead the volleyball squad in August 2023. Three months later, her players advanced to a conference volleyball championship game for the first time since 2019.
- Kaitlyn Carringer-Adams ’19 was named the College’s men’s and women’s cross country coach in June 2023. Four months later, the women placed second at the Maryville College Invitational, the only home meet of the season.
- With a young team of his own, Coach Darrin Travillian led the women’s basketball team to the semifinals of the CCS tournament.
- Under Coach Doug Corbett, the women’s tennis team wrapped season play with a 12-9 record … including a run of eight matches in a row that saw the Scots undefeated from March 11 to April 10.
In the hours and days after that last softball game, Quatrocky was finally able to savor it all.
“I have a hard time celebrating, because I’m never satisfied. I always want more, because I know how much it means to our kids,” she said. “In those moments, I’m relieved, and I’m grateful we got the recognition that we deserved, but I’m also like, ‘On to the next challenge.’ But this year … this year was special. So many times, we get overlooked, and that’s what was special about our softball and soccer tournament bids: Those were at-large bids, so the selection of our teams was based on what they had accomplished. It wasn’t automatic, so that relief, that joy, comes from other people seeing the greatness our kids have shown all year long.”
An exclusive ‘club’
“Club Honaker,” as they lightheartedly refer to it, is something of a ghost town in mid-summer. Located in the Cooper Athletic Center and named after Lombe S. Honaker, whose tenure (1921 to 1959) earned him the distinction of being “the greatest coach in MC history,” the partition-divided room serves as central command for coaches of numerous sports at Maryville College. On a particularly warm July day — 35 years and 24 hours to the day he joined the MC staff — Fernandez is working on the fall soccer schedule.
“We’re always texting each other during the year, especially when several of us have games on the same day — ‘Club Honaker did well today!’” Fernandez said. “There’s not a single person on this staff that wouldn’t do anything for me, that would take advantage of any opportunity to help me out, and I’d do the same for them. If another coach needs you for something, you’re there for them.
“If I bring a potential recruit to campus, and he happens to be from (football) Coach (Ben) Fox’s hometown, I can bring that recruit by, and he’ll sit down and spend time with them, even though they’re not here for football. Everybody would do that for each other, and it’s one of the reasons to stay a coach at Maryville: that support we have for each other, through good times and bad times.”
The 2023-24 academic year included some very good times, especially for the women’s soccer team. Not only did the Scots win the regular season, they took home the Collegiate Conference of the South championship trophy with a double overtime win and received an at-large bid to the NCAA DIII tournament, eventually losing in the first round to Washington University. Along the way, Fernandez was inducted into the Blount County Sports Hall of Fame, and his players were consistently recognized for their accomplishments both on and off the field.
The men’s soccer team, which Fernandez also coaches, finished with a winning record and fought hard to the CCS tournament semifinals, but there was something special about the women this past year, Fernandez added. They took the “student” part of their title just as seriously as the “athlete” part, he added — the seasonal GPA was a 3.7, and in all of the classes taken by all of the players, only a single D was handed down. That academic discipline, he said, carried over onto the athletic field as well.
“Being a fall sport, our preparation in the spring really sets the stage, and one of the key things we’ve talked about with this women’s team is the way they conducted themselves in the offseason, and how much accountability they took,” he said. “They worked out with strength coaches, but they’d be sitting in the hallway waiting on them, all wearing the same outfit, and totally prepared without any coach intervention.
“Little things like that showed us the type of team we were going to have. If team leadership rests solely with the coaches, it’s going to be a tough year, but this group of female athletes was exceptional, and their commitment to some of our core values was exceptional. One of those core values is that they’re a collection of friends first, soccer players second, and they always kept that in their mind.”
Case in point: Hailey Cartt ’24 — a Biochemistry major with a 4.0 GPA who was given the prestigious LeQuire Award at the MC Celebration of Student Achievement last April — built herself into an all-conference, all-region center midfielder during her first three years as a Scot. She was, Fernandez said, one of the top 10 players in the nation in that particular position … but when it came time to tighten up the defense, Fernandez and his assistants were at a loss over ways to strengthen certain weak points.
“We were thin in the back and struggling with what to do, and even though she was an obvious choice, we thought, ‘We can’t play her back there,’” he said. “But there was not one second of hesitation on her part. She said, ‘Coach, I’ll do what’s best for the team.’ And she went on to be named an all-conference defensive MVP in a brand new position for her senior year.
“That kind of dedication flowed through this team, and it made them even more special. They rose to the occasion, their accountability was at such a high level, and all of those things gave them more ownership in this team than probably any group of players we’ve ever had.”
Winners beget winners
Stepping up and standing firm: Those traits weren’t exclusive to the women’s soccer team … or even to the student-athletes. Throughout “Club Honaker” and beyond, the coaches of Maryville College Athletics emphasize how much their individual programs thrive on the collective support of one another, and from the MC athletic community as a whole.
“Ever since I’ve been here, we’ve all sort of subscribed to that philosophy that a rising tide lifts all boats,” said Travillian, who took over as head women’s basketball coach for the 2010-2011 season and is the winningest coach in MC women’s basketball history. “Our kids and our coaches are in the trenches together. We celebrate the successes of each other’s programs, because we’re also doing that hard work, and we know what it looks like. We’ve all been on teams that come up a goal or a point short, and we’ve all been on teams that have won championships.
“There are already some natural connections between sports — for example, a lot of my girls work game management for football and soccer, so they’re already working those games anyway, but we celebrate each other, and we support each other, as much as we can. I remember Coach Jill (Moore, head softball coach) talking this past season about changing practice times, so her players could watch men’s basketball. I remember in 2016, when we were making our NCAA tournament run, the football team was having a banquet, and they made sure our game was on the big screen so they could watch.
“We encourage our kids to root for their classmates, because we want to see them at our games as well,” he added. “When you see your colleagues and peers and fellow students in the stands, it just means a little more, and that’s been a part of our fabric here for the entirety of my tenure.”
And through supporting other teams and other sports, tennis Coach Doug Corbett added, the players themselves can discover a new method of motivation. It’s easy for the public, and sometimes the players themselves, to see Maryville College’s small size as an impediment to a team’s potential … but the success of soccer and softball during the 2023-24 year, he pointed out, demonstrated to his players that nothing could be further from the truth.
“I view it as momentum for our entire athletic department,” he said. “To see the softball team having the success it did, to almost make it to the final 16 teams in the entire country, showed our girls that if you set your goals high, if you put in the work and you’re close to one another and you do all the little things, who knows where we can end up? It inspires some belief and confidence that it can be done at Maryville, and that’s just huge in terms of motivation.”
