One cool fall morning Kim Waddell, the finally-returning head coach of Pioneer Varsity Softball, sat on a dewy metal bench beneath the wooden ceiling of a faded purple dugout. On the home field at Pioneer High School, she could see both the past and the future laid out in front of her. Waddell, a graduate and former softball player for Eastern Michigan University, was finally back at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Mich., doing her favorite thing in the world—coaching softball.

“It’s probably the thing I love most,” said Waddell about being a softball coach. She had previously coached softball at Pioneer for 21 years, until a family emergency pulled her away in 2004. Finally, after many years of absence, she returned to where she belongs. Waddell, also a field hockey goalie for Eastern, spent the last few autumns coaching Pioneer’s Varsity Field Hockey team with Jane Nixon. Although she loves field hockey, she’s spent the past years “constantly looking down at the softball field.”

However, she’s currently faced with a program in desperate need of rebuilding—one much different than the illustrious one she left thirteen years ago. Her first round of coaching at Pioneer was an “intense amount of pressure,” as she was a new head coach at a school whose softball program was one of the best in the state. “[We] remained in the top ten pretty much the entire time I was here,”said Waddell.

Despite all those stellar seasons, Pioneer Softball never achieved the ultimate goal for any strong team: a state championship. From 1993 to 1996, Pioneer Softball found itself falling just short of the gold. One of these games still haunts Waddell almost 24 years later. On June 15th 1994, Pioneer found itself facing Jenison High School for a six o’clock championship game. The game stretched on and on, lasting 11 innings in 101 degree heat. Pioneer would emerge from this game defeated and devastated. “I will never forget it,” said Waddell. “It was heartbreaking beyond words.”

Although the current era of Pioneer Softball isn’t in the same position it was 20 years ago, Waddell has hope that she can help to get it back on its feet. Her biggest priority at the moment is increasing the number of people who are interested in playing softball. Already, Waddell is spreading the word and getting more students interested in ether continuing or learning softball. “People are contacting and jumping on,” she said. This is a big step up for the program which, in its most recent season, had about 25 players between both the Varsity and Junior Varsity teams. She believes that getting the numbers up across the program will be a huge step towards success.

All in all, however, Waddell believes that her main job as the Varsity coach will be to make her team grow, both as athletes and as people. She calls her position merely the “organizer of the greatest kids,” and believes that enthusiasm will be her greatest tool in rebuilding. “[I try to] approach it as more than just ‘this is a sport we’re learning,’ and turn it into life lessons, as much of a cliche as that sounds,” said Waddell about what she tries to do for her team. In her eyes, the key to getting players to love the sport as much as she does will be to “capture them by example.” When she starts next spring as the Varsity Softball coach for Pioneer, she intends to do just that.