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Why They Coach: Larissa Anderson

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Over the course of eight weeks, PowerMizzou.com is running a series of stories with the head coach of every varsity sport at Mizzou. The basic gist of the interviews began as “why do you coach?” Throughout each story, there will be many of the same questions, but with each subject we veer off on to some tangents as well. These interviews will run every Tuesday and Friday morning on the site Today, our conversation with head softball coach Larissa Anderson.

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PM: We start everyone with the same question. When you were growing up, what was your involvement in sports?

LA: "Grew up in a very small resort town in Lake George, New York in the Adirondack Mountains. Played everything growing up. Growing up, really, I was a downhill ski racer. Very different. Recreational kid. Just played. My family got me into downhill ski racing at a very early age. Skied all through high school, then played soccer at a very early age. Played softball. Always made the all-star team. Then a very small town so really they didn't have varsity sports till the ninth grade. Then I had to make a decision. Played volleyball in ninth through 12th, played very well. I was a pretty good volleyball player. Still skied and then played softball. It wasn't until I finished my tenth grade year, I pitched slingshot. Pitched and played shortstop and all I did when I wound up was just threw it as hard as I possibly could. No technique whatsoever. And I went to the New York state championships in Albany after my 10th grade season and saw my first windmill pitcher. So this was in 1991. Saw my first windmill pitcher and I went to my high school coach and I said 'I want to do that.' And she said, 'Okay, let's find a camp.' And I went to a camp, UCONN coach coach Karen Mullins was there and a couple other great Northeast coaches and I learned how to pitch windmill. Then went out and we won a state championship my junior year in high school and I just absolutely fell in love with it and realized I was really good.

At that camp, another player went up to me and said 'What ASA travel ball team do you play on?' I said, 'What's that? I don't know what ASA is.' She said, 'You can play in college. You need to find a travel ball team.' So got on a travel team, had to commute an hour to Albany from Lake George and there I got recruited. Ended up playing Division Two softball at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. Went because I was a physical therapy major and it was one of the few schools in the country where I could play ball all four years and still get a degree as a physical therapist. It was an automatic Master's program. I didn't have to do internships during my career. I wanted to play ball for four years and that's really what I wanted to do. In my head, it was physical therapy is going to pay the bills and I'm going to have a paycheck and softball's going to be my passion. And I knew I always had the game. And then when I realized that I could actually make a profession out of coaching softball, that kind of took me down the path I am now.

Met my future husband when I was in college. He was playing minor league baseball. He came to help out with the baseball coach at Gannon. They played professional ball together. That part is history. The funny thing is that when he first met me, I was playing catch and he was a catcher. My maiden name is Smith so I was nicknamed Smitty all through college. So first thing he ever said to me was, he's like, 'Smitty, I just saw you throw.' And of course, I'm the cool kid and I'm like, 'Yeah, what's up?' He said, 'You've got a pretty good arm.' I was like, 'Yeah, I know.' He said, 'Do you want to at least have one kid together?' That was his pickup line. And the rest is history. It worked. It totally worked. He got a job as an assistant coach at Hofstra University and I followed him to Long Island and then I started coaching at Long Island University and CW Post. Coached there for two years. The same exact week his head coach at Hofstra got fired, Patrick got picked up as a hitting instructor by the Kansas City Royals, I got the job at Hofstra. So seventeen years later, I became the head coach and then here I am at Mizzou."

PM: So skiing doesn't seem like a sport you can just kind of do on the side. Was that pretty much full time?

LA: "Everyone I raced against went to a private academy. Lake Placid was only 90 miles north of where I lived. So you don't race for your high school. You race for a club team representing the mountain. So I raced for Gore Mountain and Whiteface Mountain in Lake Placid. And my father really wanted me to stay in public school. He didn't want me to be a private school high school student. He wanted me to play three sports and experience that life. And we had people from New York State Racing Association write letters to my high school kind of explain the commitment and to make sure my classes were in the morning and I could go train in the afternoon and if you don't accommodate her, we're going to pull her out and she's going to go to a private school. And because I was such a good softball player, they wanted to make sure that they accommodated those needs. I was hardly ever in high school. I went to Mount Hood in Oregon and trained in the summer. But it taught me so much because it's an individual sport. So it taught me that I needed to prepare myself and take care of myself which then helped me become a better softball player.'

PM: You sound kind of like you were the kid that was just annoyingly good at everything you did.

LA: "I think I could go play darts right now and beat anybody. Yes. I'm very. very competitive. I'm the first born. Athletic things were very easy for me."

PM: Does that run in your family?

LA: "My mom's a good athlete.She went to Cortland College to be a phys ed major. She always played catch with me out front. Funny story, when I learned how to pitch, she was catching me in the front yard. I hit her in the shin and she threw down her glove and said 'This is no longer fun for me.' She goes, 'Your brother's going to become a catcher.' We were always centered around sports. My dad was a New York Giants season ticket holder and a huge Brooklyn Dodgers fan and everything, we were always around sports. Skiing, it was just part of our life."

PM: You said you didn't really plan on being a coach until late in college?

LA: "It was one of those where I knew I could always coach something somewhere. I didn't think it was going to be college. I absolutely didn't. Until I spent one whole year in the normal workforce working 9 to 5 which was very difficult for me because my parents were self employed. I mean, self-employed people make their own hours. When I worked 9 to 5, I didn't understand how you scheduled doctor's appointments and how you go to the bank. It was a different world for me and I didn't like it. So then I started working camps and I started getting involved in college camps all around Long Island. There was one summer I think I did about 36 camps in the summer because I wanted to teach the game and be exposed to different coaches because I wanted them to get to know me to kind of market myself so that when a job opened, people already knew who I was, that I was working my butt off to make ends meet coaching softball."

PM: So what was your break, your foot in the door as far as an actual coaching job?

LA: "I was working a camp for New York Tech and it was a softball/baseball camp of really young kids. There were a lot of baseball guys there and the head coach of Long Island University-CW Post played baseball at CW Post so he was in the whole baseball world. His buddies new that he was going to be looking for an assistant. That was my foot in the door. I made $1500 my first paycheck for the year. I continued the same thing to make ends meet, worked a ton of camps. I found a job in New York City on Park Avenue at a children's athletic training school, which was unbelievable because one, you're working on Park Avenue so you have a whole different population of people. You see nannies, you don't see parents. It was kids ages one through six teaching them the basic athletic fundamentals. So parents would pay for this class, 45 minutes, an hour-and-a-half, to teach their three-year-old how to throw, how to kick. It all started because it was this husband and wife pro tennis players that were frustrated teaching kids that had never picked up a tennis racket until later on in life. So they wanted to teach kids some of these basic athletic fundamentals. So then I learned how to break down a skill to teach a three-year-old how to throw. And it's not the same that you're going to teach a college kid. It's knocking over blocks and being able to put a basketball in a hoop and those types of things. That really gave the me the foundation of teaching. Because if I can explain it to a three-year-old, I can explain it to a 19-year-old."

PM: I don't know at that point what opportunities existed to play beyond college. Was that ever a consideration?

LA: "So I graduated and had a pretty decent college career at the Division Two level. I went to play, they called it semi-pro because you got a little money, but it wasn't like the NPF now at all. It was women's major mostly. I was like, 'I just want to see if I'm good enough to play women's major' because I'd been on my own little island. And I made the team and I'm like, 'Okay, now I know I'm good enough, but this isn't what I'm going to do.' So then I just continued to move on into coaching.

PM: You said you never thought you'd be coaching college. What did you think you were going to be doing and what led you to college?

LA: "It was going to be a travel ball team or a high school team. Because physical therapy and recreational therapy was going to pay the bills and then I could always have a team. Just so I was still teaching the game. Then when I got this opportunity at CW Post, this is probably the neat part. The story that I like to tell is when I first saw my first windmill pitcher, it was, 'Wow, I think I can do that.' Okay, find an opportunity, someone to teach me and make the most of it. Then it's like, 'Wow, I think I could play in college.' Find an opportunity, make the most of it. 'Well, I think I can coach.' Had an opportunity at Division Two. And then it was, 'I wonder if I could coach Division One? I wonder if I would get that shot?' And then I have a shot to coach Division One and there I am for 17 years winning so many conference championships. And there I am all that time saying 'I wonder if I would have an opportunity to coach in Power Five?' It's like all these things lead up to where I am right now because of hopes and dreams and opportunities and taking advantage of those opportunities. When I became the head coach at Hofstra, it's like, 'Okay what are we going to differently with this program?' because it worked under Bill Edwards for 25 years and he already won 23 conference championships in 25 years so what can I do a little bit differently and a little bit better? It's winning two conference championships in four years, winning one my first year as a head coach, doing those types of things to be able to get noticed to be able to have an opportunity here."

PM: 17 years is a long time at one place. Did you think that's where you would stay?

LA: "There were opportunities early on in my tenure at Hofstra to leave. I probably could have been a head coach early on. People were coming after me. ADs and other head coaches are looking at the mid-majors because they're overachievers. So IO knew it was always going to be there because I had great mentoring and people helping me along the way, but I think it took a lot of realizing it wasn't the right time and the grass isn't always greener. Some of the Universities I did interview at, some offered me jobs and some didn't, I learned a lot from those experiences. But softball wasn't the most important thing in the athletic department. I had my cake and I ate it too at Hofstra because it was the best athletic program, we were the premier sport. I loved having a relationship with my athletic director and those were the important things to me. So when I would visit other institutions and softball was such a small part of a big athletic department, I didn't like that feeling. I wanted to be special and I wanted people to pay attention to softball."

PM: So why was this the right opportunity when it came along?

LA: "Because I got a call from Jim Sterk. I got a call from him Monday morning after the NCAA regionals, first thing about 8 o'clock in the morning. I got a text message from him. At the time, I didn't know who Jim Sterk was. I had a voicemail from a Missouri number, I thought it was spam so I didn't answer it and hit ignore. Then all of a sudden I got a text message that says 'Larissa, we're interested in you in our head coaching job at the University of Missouri. Signed, Jim Sterk.' I immediately go, 'who's Jim Sterk?' and look up and he's the athletic director at the University of Missouri and I immediately said, 'Wow, this is big time. This is the real deal. I have to make a choice right now am I going to be leaving Hofstra or am I going to retire at Hofstra?' Because if I said no to this opportunity, it was never, ever going to happen to me again. Because everybody in the country would know she's not leaving. Why waste our time? We're not going to go after her anymore, she's staying there forever."

PM: Everything you'd done to that point was on the East coast. Was there hesitation at all moving across the country?

LA: "Not really. Because it's close enough and it isn't the East coast and I still consider myself and East coast girl. I have an East coast mentality and temper. But when I came out, first when I met everyone in the administration, they flew out to me and that impressed me probably more than anything. I immediately called a lot of my colleagues that coach in the SEC that I know very closely and I said 'Okay, Missouri's flying out to see me tomorrow, what do I need to be prepared for?' And the response was, 'They're flying out to you? You're not flying to them?' I said, 'No they're flying to Hempstead, New York to see me.' The response was, 'They really want you. This is big-time.' So that continued to impress me and the relationship that we started to develop, just sitting in a conference room for three hours about their mission, it lined up with mine. I knew because those things lined up that it was going to be a good fit. I played out here in 2013 when Hofstra played Mizzou in the NCAA regionals so I was kind of familiar with the area. It's not the deep south. I think I would kind of be a fish out of water if I went there. Not to say I wouldn't, but it would be a little different culture from what I'm used to. Then when I came out here, I knew it was the right fit. It was the right fit because of Lake George, New York. Because of my roots. Being in a small town, that I'm not a New York City girl. I'm really a Lake George, Adirondack girl. Because of the small town, small high school, resort, hometown feel, that's what I felt when I was here. Immediately."

PM: Your husband being athletic and being involved in sports, is that good?

LA: "It's good and bad. Because not only I'm being judged by the public and the parents, but also my husband knows what I do. So it's a good thing because I can pick his brain on a lot of skill work. When I watch his team practice and do early work and a lot of things from spring training, I'm now bringing that to my program. So I have another set of coaching eyes. That's great. And when he watches us in the offseason he picks up on different things that really, really help us. At the same time, it can be bad, because when I get home and we have a bad game, he wants to talk about it and pick it apart."

PM: Now that you've been at Missouri, what are the challenges that are specific to this job?

LA: "There's a lot more media responsibilities that I have that I never had before. Every week I'll have media day and the reporters after games and the podcasts and those types of things. In the public eye, which I love. I really enjoy that aspect of the job. It's not why I do it, but I think we have such a strong message here that I can continue to educate and help coaches that were in my shoes. I wish I had someone that I could listen to maybe on a daily basis or aspire to be. Especially the way social media is now. When I grew up I didn't have the opportunity to be able to follow someone and I think it's important to me to be able to help younger coaches. I'm so passionate about preparing coaches for the next step in their career. I speak at the national convention all the time on interviewing skills and preparing yourself and how you know when it's right to take the next job. Because I had opportunities all along the way and for me to be able to say no to certain schools when the paycheck's really good, but you just know it's not the right step to get me where I want to go, it's important for me to help other people. I look at probably the most successful programs in the country. Their staffs have been the same for such a long period of time that there isn't mentoring going on because they're there. You know, you look at like the University of Michigan and I think Hutch (Carol Hutchins) is such an unbelievable coach and leader in our industry, she's had the same staff for 15 plus years. So those aren't the ones that need the mentoring, it's the ones that are continuing to move and I feel that it's my responsibility to help them."

PM: You mentioned the competitiveness and the temper. Is that something you've had to learn to dial back as you've coached?

LA: "I was much more high strung as a young assistant. When someone would do something wrong, and I wanted the discipline to happen right now. Bill Edwards would tell me 'You need to sleep on it. You can't make irrational decisions. You need to make sure you're doing the best for the program and the best for this kid.' So it calmed me down a little bit and now I'm so much more laid back. It's funny because I have Sara Michalowski who played for me at Hofstra as an assistant and I have Michaela Transue who recently just played for me and was a grad assistant who's going to be our volunteer this year, they'll come up to me and they're exactly like I was. They're like, 'How are you putting up with this?' I'm like, 'Calm down. Baby steps. We have to be patient. They don't know any better.' So it's like walking them through, but the biggest difference is being a New Yorker, it's the urgency. New Yorkers are very, very passionate and we're urgent in everything we do. People just think it's rude, but we're always on a mission. There's times I've said to my team when we need to be a little bit more urgent, I've said, "you need to pretend you're a New Yorker right now. Let's go. We need a little urgent in our giddy-up.' Just because everything is a little bit more laid back than my mentality sometimes."

PM: We talked about challenges of this job, but overall, what's the biggest challenge of being a coach?

LA: "They have so many more distractions than they did ten years ago, 15 years ago, obviously 20 years ago. They have a lot more choices, they have a lot more pressure, because they have a lot more distractions. Everything they do is scrutinized because of social media and there's always that pressure and that image. I think that's probably the biggest challenge is understanding that. I think when coaches get too caught up in the old school and 'it wasn't like this when I played,' you're not understanding what they're going through. What they're going through hasn't changed, but the pressure that's involved in it has. So I have to be a little bit more compassionate about some of those things and kind of speak on their level. So we will communicate through like a GroupMe app and I'll put together a poll on an app to get their opinion because that's how they communicate and I have to be able to compromise some of those things to be able to get my message across to them. Because if I can't talk to them on their level, the same way if I can't talk to a three-year-old, then I've lost their interest. That's probably the biggest challenge. I'll have to make sure I don't date myself and continue to get older, in my head, how are they communicating? What are they dealing with? So then I can understand them a little bit better."

PM: A challenge that's a little unique to you here. What's the difficulty of taking over a team that's not your team that suddenly becomes your team?

LA: "Getting to know 28 people very fast. That was very tough. One, it's a huge roster for softball. Started at 32. Trying to, one, learn 32 names, is tough. Then getting to know every personality. Because I have to be able to coach every personality. Softball, your roster ideally, sometimes they're 18 to 20. So that was a bigger challenge for me and I probably failed in some of those areas because I, one, didn't have the time, or didn't commit enough to it. I only get them for 20 hours a week and how much am I going to really know them when they're taking ground balls? So I probably have to put a little bit more effort in getting to know them a little bit more off the field and having some casual conversations maybe in the office or at lunch or things like that."

PM: Challenges aside, what's the best part about what you do?

LA: "Just coaching in general is seeing them get better. That's the most rewarding. And for them to say thank you. And then the bigger picture is when they get a job and you're one of their first phone calls. Or they get married or they have their first child and you're involved in their life after they take the uniform off. That's the most rewarding. I had two alumni weddings this summer and that's probably the most awesome because now you're seeing them outside the softball element and you're sharing their joy."

PM: I've had a lot of people say that might not be immediate when they leave, but a few years down the road, maybe they realize it more.

LA: "Yes. Definitely. Not everyone figures it out at the same time. Some kids figure it out while they're here and that's great. Those are the ones that really, really flourish. The ones that figure it out a little bit after, even if it's ten years, eventually you want them all to be able to figure it out."

PM: Whenever you walk away, what would you want people that played for you to say about you as a coach?

LA: "That I cared about them. That I helped make them not only better players, but better people. I want to be remembered as just really caring about them. A hundred percent with them all the time. And that I always did what was best for them. Not only what was best for the team, but best for them. That to me is really important. It always is their best interest at heart. All the time. That might not be what they want to hear, but it is for their best interest."

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