This fall will mark 10 years since Missouri announced a seismic change: The athletics department would leave the Big 12 conference and join the SEC. Missouri’s new home has brought the department increased revenue, which has helped bankroll improvements like the South Endzone football facility and new softball stadium. But for virtually every sport, the move has brought new challenges, as well — better competition and more pressure to spend to keep pace.
Over the next 10 weeks, we will be counting down Missouri’s top 10 athletics moments from its first decade as a member of the SEC (which is actually nine years of competition because it took a year for the change to take effect). Note that wrestling, which has spent the past nine years as a member of the Mid-American Conference and will rejoin the Big 12 next fall, wasn’t considered for inclusion since it didn’t compete in the SEC.
We begin the list on the softball diamond.
Missouri’s softball program had grown into one of the country’s best during its final few seasons in the Big 12. With head coach Ehren Earleywine at the helm, the Tigers made the Women’s College World Series three consecutive seasons from 2009-2011 and briefly held a lead in the rubber match of their super regional in 2012 before falling to LSU. The move to the SEC represented a step up in competition, but during Missouri’s first season in its new league, the Tigers largely continued their strong play, going 15-8 in regular-season conference matchups and advancing to the finals of the SEC Tournament.
Yet on the final day of Missouri’s NCAA regional, the Tigers’ season hung by a thread, and the outlook wasn’t exactly rosy.
That morning, No. 6 Missouri lost 10-0 to CAA power Hofstra, which forced a decisive final game in the series. The only reason that loss didn’t end the Tigers’ season was because the team had pulled out a 1-0 victory over the Pride in its first matchup of the regional, despite recording just a single hit off star pitcher Olivia Galati. Galati, who led the nation in both wins and strikeouts that season, surrendered a total of just five hits and two walks during her first two matchups with Missouri in that series.
While Missouri would match Galati with its own star in the circle, Chelsea Thomas, the Tigers’ pitching situation was a bit rocky. Thomas had gutted through pain and loss of feeling in her right arm throughout her final season of college, which she later found out was the result of Thoracic Outlet Syndrome. It got so bad, Thomas said, that she rarely threw between outings, and after some games, she lost her grip strength to the point that she couldn’t squeeze toothpaste out of its tube. Plus, after losing a pitcher earlier in the season, Missouri had no depth behind Thomas. The Tigers’ next best option was converted third baseman and outfielder Nicole Hudson, who prior to that season hadn’t pitched since high school and who Hofstra lit up for nine runs in the second game of the series.
Despite all that seemed to be working against Missouri, however, Thomas never doubted whether Missouri would win the rubber match and advance to a super regional. In fact, eight years later, she had to look up a box score from the game to jog her memory of that day. Dramatic as it might have been, that moment doesn’t stand out among Thomas’ top memories from her five-year Missouri career, because at that point, the team simply didn't lose regionals. She wouldn’t let it.
“It wasn’t one of those series where I felt like we weren’t ever not going to win, if that makes sense,” Thomas explained. “It wasn’t one that stood out to me as one that, oh gosh, that was close.”
Even though Thomas was hurting, both teams knew entering the game that, with the two-time first-team All-American in the circle, Hofstra wasn’t likely to record another offensive outburst. Whether or not Missouri extended its streak of super regional appearances to six years would depend on the Tiger hitters’ ability to figure out Galati.
That’s where Earleywine’s management of the series gave the Tigers an edge. In the second matchup between Missouri and Hofstra, with the Pride facing elimination, Earleywine knew then-Hofstra pitching coach (and current Missouri head coach) Larissa Anderson had no choice but to ride Galati. He opted not to pitch Thomas, knowing that even if Missouri lost the game, it would give his hitters another chance to see Galati and add to her pitch count before she would have to face off against Thomas once again.
Kelsea Roth, who started at first base for Missouri that season, said the primary directive from the coaching staff entering the final game of the series was to take more pitches and work deeper into counts, making the already worn down Galati work even harder to get outs.
“Our whole attitude was if that pitch is coming in and it’s looking really good, then nine times out of 10 it’s going to be way over your head and not there,” Roth explained. “So I think it was just pitch selection and allowing ourselves to kind of get deeper into the count, and not just start swinging when we see the ball just right out of the hands.”
It didn’t take long for the strategy to pay off. Hudson, back to playing in the field, got on base with a double in the bottom of the first inning, then Mackenzie Sykes drove her home with a single. In the second inning, Roth connected for her 16th home run of the season, giving Missouri more runs than it had scored through the first two games against Hofstra combined.
Roth remembers taking out two games’ worth of frustration with her home run swing.
“I think I was mad, because it took me this long,” she said with a laugh. “Like I said, the adjustments were taking forever, so I was finally able to get a good pitch and swing at the right pitch.”
The early lead took some of the pressure off Thomas’ shoulders. She remembers telling the team all season, “you get me two (runs), we’re golden.”
As it turned out, she wouldn’t even need that much support. Thomas carved up the Hofstra lineup, allowing just a single hit and no walks while striking out nine. When Hudson homered in the bottom of the fifth inning to extend Missouri’s lead to 5-0, even Anderson understood that Hofstra’s season was coming to a close.
“When it gets to that point, then it's like, okay, you know what, this is going to be the end of (the seniors’) careers,” Anderson said during a Zoom interview last week. “And you want to stay competitive and you want to keep battling, but the reality is, you're not going to score five runs off of Chelsea Thomas.”
Thomas’ vintage performance marked her final appearance at Missouri’s University Field and the last of her program-record 111 wins. She still holds the record for strikeouts by a Missouri pitcher with 1,174 and ranks third all-time in complete games (97), shutouts (46), innings pitched (925.0) and winning percentage (.728). She finished the 2013 season with a record of 24-6 and a 1.16 ERA, which earned her first-team all-America status for the third time in her career. No other Missouri softball player has ever matched that feat.
“Any time that girl stepped in the circle we always knew that she was going to give it her best, and honestly, there’s not a lot of offenses that could hit her,” Roth said of Thomas. “So we definitely had full confidence in her.”
While Thomas admitted that, at the time, winning a regional didn’t feel all that special for Missouri, the 2013 postseason impacted the program in a couple lasting ways. For one, the team proved that it belonged in the best softball conference in the nation. Some around the sport wondered if the Tigers could continue their success in a league that routinely puts all 13 teams in the NCAA Tournament. While a reality check would come a few years later, Roth and Thomas both remember the team’s success in the 2013 SEC Tournament as a statement to the rest of the league.
“We definitely had to prove ourselves coming into an even more dominant conference,” Roth said. “... So for that first year it was kind of proving we belong and that tournament, the SEC Tournament, was where we kind of knew that, yeah, we do belong in this conference.”
The program’s success wouldn’t last. In 2017, as Earleywine was being investigated by the athletics department, the Tigers saw their league record dip to 7-16. After the season, Earleywine was removed from his post, and Missouri went 12-34 in SEC play across the next two seasons.
Yet, even though no one realized it at the time, Missouri’s matchups with Hofstra in 2013 played a big part in its current resurrection. As Jim Sterk looked for Earleywine’s permanent replacement, Anderson, who by that point had spent the past four seasons as the head coach at Hofstra, thought back to the 2013 series at Missouri. When Sterk called, she remembered the passion displayed by the Tiger fans and reciprocated his interest.
Three years later, Missouri sits fourth in the SEC and appears well-positioned to host an NCAA Regional for the first time since 2016. The Tigers have a chance to finish the season with their best SEC record since joining the league, which would best the mark set during that 2013 season.
“When we went to that championship game and we lost, every single fan, every single Mizzou fan, stayed in the stands,” Anderson recalled. “And they stayed to applaud our senior class. They waited until Hofstra walked off the field. They then lined the entrance way, as we walked to the bus, to give us a round of applause as we exited to show the respect that they had for Hoftra’s program.
“And when Mizzou called me to accept the position to be the head coach here, it was those things that really, really stood out, because then that shows me the culture that they have within the athletic department and within the softball program, and the respect they have for the sport. To have that feeling of when you're at a visiting school in the NCAA regional and they show you the respect that they have for the game, that's something that I definitely want to be a part of.”
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